A Final Word

In this column we continued our series on Web services. We focused here on connecting XML files to JavaScript. This is the first in a miniseries about XML loading and manipulating of the DOMDocument object. We showed you in this column how to describe the tree-like DOMDocument object. Understanding this tree will be more important in upcoming columns, as they will concentrate on manipulating and querying this tree. In this column, we focused more on parsing and loading XML files. We showed you how to monitor XML parsing and loading with the readyState property and the onreadystatechange event handler. We explained how to set synchronous loading on and off with the async property. We covered the error object, IXMLDOMParseError, and all its many properties that will help you to pinpoint parsing errors for your users.

In this column you have learned:

• How to draw the DOMDocument graph
• How to read an XML file
• How to monitor XML parsing and building
• How to report errors during parsing and building