XML is a markup language for documents that contain structured information. An XML document is a tree of nodes, where each node can have one or more attributes. It can also have one or more child nodes, each of them a different type than its parent.

XML specifies the structure of a document; it does not specify how to display it. XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents—for example, into a human-readable format such as HTML. ATG products provide XSLT and JSP templates that transform XML documents for display.

For more about XML and XSLT, see www.w3.org/XML and www.w3.org/TR/xslt.

XML and DOM

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform- and language-independent standard object model for representing HTML and XML formats. It defines the logical structure of documents and how they are accessed and manipulated.

The DOM represents an XML document as a tree of nodes, where a DOM document is an instance of org.w3c.dom.Document. Each node in a DOM document is an instance of some subclass of the Node class org.w3c.dom.Node. Node subclasses include Element, Text, and Comment. Node properties include nodeName, nodeType, nodeValue, childNodes, firstChild, and lastChild. The Node interface provides methods that let you determine whether a node has children, its type, and its value. You can use these methods to iterate over, manipulate, and display a DOM document and its nodes.

For more information about DOM, see the Document Object Model Level 2 specification at http://www.w3.org/DOM/DOMTR.