Glossary

Fredrik Lundh | September 2007

Builder. A class or other object that builds an Element tree. The standard TreeBuilder class is an example of such a class.

Document Order. The order that the elements appear in in an XML document. Same as “depth-first traversal”.

Element. 1) An XML element, consisting of a start tag, attributes, some content, and an end tag. 2) A class or other object that can hold an XML element in memory.

Element Tree. A hierarchical structure of elements.

Namespace. A scope that tags and attribute names can be bound to. A namespace is identified by an URI, represented as a prefix in the XML document, and stored as a universal name in the Element tree.

Parser. A class or other object that reads an XML document and builds an Element tree (possibly with the help of a builder object). The standard XMLParser class is an example of such a class.

Prefix. A short name that represents a a namespace URI in an XML document. Prefix names are associated with URI:s via special xmlns attributes in the document. Prefixes are not stored in the Element tree.

Serialization. The process of converting an in-memory representation to a format that can be stored in a file, or in some other byte-oriented or text-oriented storage.

Tag. Start and end codes that are used to describe elements in an XML document.