Relating Document Structure to Nodes
Although the DOM doesn’t specify an interface to cause a document to be parsed, it does specify how the document’s syntax structures are encoded as DOM objects. A document is stored as a hierarchical tree structure, with each item in the tree linked to its parent, children, and siblings:
<sample bogus="value"><text_node>Test data.</text_node></sample>
Figure 19-1 shows how the preceding short sample document would be stored by a DOM parser.
Each Node
-derived object in
a parsed DOM document contains references to its parent, child, and
sibling nodes. These references make it possible for applications to
enumerate document data using any number of standard tree-traversal algorithms. “Walking the tree”
is a common approach to finding information stored in a DOM and is
demonstrated in Example
19-1 at the end of this chapter.
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