Accessing XML Documents by Using the Xpath Data Model

Abstract

In Chapters 2 and 3, you learned how to read and write XML documents by using the XmlDocument, XmlReader, and XmlWriter classes. These classes allow you to access the underlying documents, but by themselves they hardly provide a way to query and retrieve the data. That is why we need something that allows us to navigate, query, and retrieve data from XML documents easily and efficiently. The XPath standard is designed to do just that.