Easy Tutorial
❮ Met Comment Insertdata Met Element Removeattributens ❯

XML DOM Node Tree

XML DOM views an XML document as a tree of nodes.

All nodes in the tree have relationships with each other.


XML DOM Node Tree

XML DOM views an XML document as a tree structure. This tree structure is known as the node tree.

All nodes in this tree can be accessed. You can modify or delete their content, and create new elements.

This node tree shows the collection of nodes and their relationships. The tree starts with the root node and branches out to text nodes at the lowest level:

The image above represents the XML file books.xml.


Parent, Child, and Sibling Nodes

Nodes in the node tree have a hierarchical relationship with each other.

Parent, child, and sibling nodes describe these relationships. A parent node has child nodes, and child nodes at the same level are called sibling nodes (brothers or sisters).

The image below shows a part of the node tree and the relationships between the nodes:

Since XML data is structured in a tree format, it can be traversed without knowing the exact structure of the tree or the types of data it contains.

You will learn more about traversing the node tree in later sections of this tutorial.


First Child - Last Child

Consider the following XML snippet:

<bookstore>
    <book category="cooking">
        <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>30.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

In the XML above, the <title> element is the first child of the <book> element, and the <price> element is the last child of the <book> element.

Additionally, the <book> element is the parent of the <title>, <author>, <year>, and <price> elements.

❮ Met Comment Insertdata Met Element Removeattributens ❯