When an XML document is read into memory as a tree of nodes, the node type for the nodes are decided when the nodes are created. The XML DOM has several kinds of node types, determined by the W3C and listed in section 1.1.1 The DOM Structure Model. The following table lists the node types, the object assigned to that node type, and a short description of each.
Even though an attribute (attr) is listed in the W3C DOM Level 1 section 1.2 Fundamental Interfaces as a node, it is not considered a child of any element node.
The following table shows additional node types not defined by the W3C, however they are available for use in the .NET object model as XmlNodeType enumerations. Therefore, there is no matching DOM Node Type column for these node types.
| Node Type | Description |
| XmlDeclaration | Represents the declaration node <?xml version="1.0"...>. |
| XmlSignificantWhitespace | Represents significant white space, which is white space in mixed content. |
| XmlWhitespace | Represents the white space in the content of an element. |
| EndElement | Returned when XmlReader gets to the end of an element.
Example XML: </item> For more information, see XmlNodeType Enumeration. |
| EndEntity | Returned when XmlReader gets to the end of the entity replacement as a result of a call to ResolveEntity. For more information, see XmlNodeType Enumeration. |
To view a code example that reads in XML and uses a case construct on the node types to print information about the node and its contents, see XmlSignificantWhitespace.NodeType Property.
For more information on the object hierarchy of the node types and their equivalent object name, see XML Document Object Model (DOM) Hierarchy. For more information on the objects created in the node tree, see Mapping the Object Hierarchy to tXML Data.
See Also
XML Document Object Model (DOM)