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XML DOM Nodes

In the DOM, everything in an XML document is a node.

DOM Nodes

According to the DOM, everything in an XML document is a node.

The DOM says:

The entire document is a document node
Every XML element is an element node
The text in the XML elements are text nodes
Every attribute is an attribute node
Comments are comment nodes

DOM Example

Look at the following XML file (books.xml):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<bookstore>
<book category="cooking">
  <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title> 
  <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author> 
  <year>2005</year> 
  <price>30.00</price> 
</book>
<book category="children">
  <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title> 
  <author>J K. Rowling</author> 
  <year>2005</year> 
  <price>29.99</price> 
</book>
<book category="web">
  <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title> 
  <author>James McGovern</author> 
  <author>Per Bothner</author> 
  <author>Kurt Cagle</author> 
  <author>James Linn</author> 
  <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author> 
  <year>2003</year> 
  <price>49.99</price> 
</book>
<book category="web" cover="paperback">
  <title lang="en">Learning XML</title> 
  <author>Erik T. Ray</author> 
  <year>2003</year> 
  <price>39.95</price> 
</book>
</bookstore>

The root node in the XML above is named <bookstore>. All other nodes in the document are contained within <bookstore>.

The root node <bookstore> holds four <book> nodes.

The first <book> node holds four nodes: <title>, <author>, <year>, and <price>, which contains one text node each, "Everyday Italian", "Giada De Laurentiis", "2005", and "30.00".

Text is Always Stored in Text Nodes

A common error in DOM processing is to expect an element node to contain text.

However, the text of an element node is stored in a text node.

In this example: <year>2005</year>, the element node <year>, holds a text node with the value "2005".

"2005" is not the value of the <year> element!