Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition

6.4. Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to create and traverse the XML DOM objects in the major browsers of today, as well as the differences between IE and non-IE implementations. You once again used the cross-browser XML library zXml, which enables you to create, traverse, and manipulate XML DOM objects easily using a single interface. You also learned how to load XML data using JavaScript and output it to the page.

In the second section, a brief introduction to XPath showed you the power the language offers for XML documents. You learned how IE and the other browsers implement XPath and namespace support and how they differ from each other. To ease this difficulty, the zXPath object of the zXml library was introduced, again providing one interface to select desired nodes easily for both browsers.

Finally, you learned about XSLT transformations and how to perform them using MSXML and the XSLTProcessor class. Although the two interfaces have a few things in common, another cross-browser object of the zXml library was introduced to smooth out the wrinkles: the zXslt object, which allows XSLT transformations to be performed on both platforms with one method call.