alexl wrote:


> not clear on the difference between IXMLDOMElement and IXMLDOMNode. I
> thought they both represent a tag?
>  <sampletag>
    ^^^^^^^^^^
That is a tag, a start tag, and here
   </sampletag>
   ^^^^^^^^^^^
you have another tag, an end tag. In the markup (the source code of an 
XML document) there are tags while on the logical structure there are 
elements.
In the DOM a hierachical object oriented approach has been taken to 
model an XML document as a tree of nodes where you have a common base 
class or interface Node and other more specialized interfaces or classes 
that extend Node, e.g. Element, Document, Text, Attribute, 
ProcessingInstruction, Comment.
So everything you have in the DOM object model of an XML document is a 
node and has at least the properties and methods defined for the Node 
interface (or IXMLDOMNode in the case of MSXML).
But while there are common properties and methods all types of nodes 
share there a specialized properties/methods for for instance element 
nodes and these are defined by the Element respectively IXMLDOMElement 
interface.
As long as you use dynamic scripting languages like JavaScript or 
VBScript to script the DOM you can simply check
   node.nodeType
to find which type of node you have (e.g. 1 for element node, 3 for text 
node) and you can always simply use the properties and methods of the 
most specialized interface then.
In compiled languages with typed variables however you might need to 
cast a node to a specialized class or interface to be able to use the 
specialized properties or methods.



-- 

	Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/