Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Third Edition

An Introduction to the DOM XML Functions

The XML Parser functions are event based—that is, the document is read from top to bottom and handlers are triggered as and when the relevant features are encountered. The document object model (DOM) approach is tree-based. The entire XML document is read and rendered as a tree of objects. This means you can traverse the tree at your leisure, manipulating its nodes if you want. You can also construct your own document trees that can then be output to XML text.

PHP support for DOM was still undergoing some development at the time of writing, and the PHP manual (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.domxml.php) was temporarily out of date. However, the syntax is being brought into line with the official W3C ...