XML data islands

Июль 2nd, 2006

Internet Explorer has a nonstandard feature called XML data islands, which allow you to embed XML inside an HTML document using the nonstandard HTML tag <xml>. Mozilla does not support XML data islands and handles them as unknown HTML tags. You can achieve the same functionality using XHTML; however, because Internet Explorer’s support for XHTML is weak, this is usually not an option.

One cross-browser solution is to use DOM parsers, which parse a string that contains a serialized XML document and generates the document for the parsed XML. Mozilla uses the DOMParser class, which takes the serialized string and creates an XML document out of it. In Internet Explorer, you can achieve the same functionality using ActiveX. A new Microsoft.XMLDOM generates and has a loadXML method that can take in a string and generate a document from it. The following code shows you how:

<xml id=\"xmldataisland\">
  <foo>bar</foo>
</xml>   
	
Cross-browser solution:
 var xmlString = '<xml id=\"xmldataisland\"><foo>bar</foo></xml>';
 var myDocument; 
	
 if (document.implementation.createDocument){
   // Mozilla, create a new DOMParser
   var parser = new DOMParser();
   myDocument = parser.parseFromString(xmlString, 'text/xml');
 } else if (window.ActiveXObject){
   // Internet Explorer, create a new XML document using ActiveX
   // and use loadXML as a DOM parser.
   myDocument = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLDOM')
   myDocument.async='false';
   myDocument.loadXML(xmlString);
 }

Entry Filed under: Web, Главная, JavaScript, XML/XSL