Newbie question - XML/DOM as "internal" data

[Ghee]

Hello again, comp.text.xml,

Another newbie question, I'm afraid...

All of the examples I've seen of XML and applications deal with
converting XML to and from the way your application stores data
internally. However, do people ever actually use, say, DOM, to hold the
data for the application, thus avoiding the XML->internal data->XML
conversion? In theory, DOM looks like it could work like this; but how
does it pan out in practice?

Ghee

 

[Rolf Magnus]

Hello again, comp.text.xml,

Another newbie question, I'm afraid...

All of the examples I've seen of XML and applications deal with
converting XML to and from the way your application stores data
internally. However, do people ever actually use, say, DOM, to hold
the data for the application, thus avoiding the XML->internal
data->XML conversion?

I guess that web browsers do it this way, and of course XML editors ;-)

In theory, DOM looks like it could work like this; but
how does it pan out in practice?

I don't know, but I was wonding about that, too. It looks to me as if
it's a lot more work to directly handle the DOM tree instead of using
an internal data format. The advantage however would be that you can
easily leave data that your app doesn't understand or use unchanged so
it can still write that data to the target file. This data would be
lost if the DOM tree goes through an intermediate conversion to an
internal data structure and back.