XML Unleashed

Summary

This chapter looked at the bare essentials of XML parsing and parsers. It looked at some of the decisions that a parser is required to make, whether it's a validating parser or a nonvalidating parser.

The essential point is that XML requires the parser to act in a Draconian manner when faced with a document that is not well-formed, and it requires the parser to stop parsing the document in a normal manner.

This has two basic effects:

1. It forces authors of XML to write correct documents.

2. It makes the job of the parser much easier because it isn't required to make sense of a bad document.

You also saw that there are essentially two types of parsers, those that build a document tree and those that parse a document as a flat file. The reasons ...