Chapter 8. XML and Data Binding

In the previous chapter, we took a look at working with XML documents in Internet Explorer using the DOM. In that chapter, we used methods such as firstChild, lastChild, lastSibling, and so on to work through a document. Using methods such as those give you complete access to the data in an XML document, but regarding an XML document as a node tree can be confusing, especially if you forget that the character data in an element is stored in its own node.

There's another way of handling XML documents in Internet Explorer, however, and it also bears exploration, which we'll do in this chapter. Internet Explorer enables you to read both HTML and XML documents and to store them in a database. Using the database methods that we'll see in this chapter, you can move from record to record through your data in a way that many programmers find easier to use than the DOM methods.