XML Objects 33 CHAPTER XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an undeniably hot topic in the Internet world. Not only has the W3C organization formed multiple working groups and recommendations for XML and its offshoots, but the W3C DOM recommendation also has XML in mind when it comes to defining how elements, attributes, and data of any kind not just the HTML vocabulary are exposed to browsers as an object model. Most of the arcana of the W3C DOM Core specification especially the structure based on the node are in direct response to the XML possibilities of documents that are beginning to travel the Internet. While XML documents can stand alone as containers of structured data in both IE5+ and NN6, the Windows version of IE5+ permits XML data to be embedded as islands in an HTML document. Such islands are encased in an XML element an IE-specific extension of HTML. It s important to distinguish between the XML element the element generated in a document by the IE-specific tag set and a generic XML element that is a part of the XML data island. Generic XML elements have tag names that are meaningful to a data application, and they are usually defined by a separate Document Type Declaration (DTD) that contains a formal specification of the element names, their attributes (if any) and the nature of the data they can contain. Out of necessity, this book assumes that you are already familiar with XML such that your server-based applications serve up XML data exclusively, embed XML islands into HTML documents, or convert database data into XML. The focus of this chapter, and an extended application example of Chapter 57, is how to access custom elements that reside inside an IE XML element. Elements and Nodes Once you leave the specialized DOM vocabulary of HTML elements, the world can appear rather primitive a highly granular world of node hierarchies, elements, element attri butes, and node data. This granularity is a necessity in an environment in which the elements are far from generic and the structure of data in a document does not have to follow a format handed down from above. One Web application can …. In This Chapter Treating XML elements as objects Creating IE XML data islands Accessing XML element attributes ….
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