The Document Object Model (DOM) is the original application programming interface (API) for XML documents, as defined by the W3C. It continues to be the W3C recommendation for XML parsing.
You use the DOM API to build a hierarchical tree structure that persists in memory and represents your entire XML document. With this API, you can call the parser to build such a tree for you in memory from an XML document. The DOM tree is then available for you to easily manipulate using standard tree-traversal logic. For example, an XML document may represent a list of address changes generated from a self-service Web site. Your application might need to load the XML document into a DOM tree, perform some logical validation on the data, and only then use the data to update customer address records in your database.
You could also use the API to programmatically build a DOM tree in memory and then write that tree out as an XML document. For example, you may need to generate a list of customer address changes for a business partner.
