Differences between xmlelement and xmlnode

Xmlelement is a subclass of xmlnode (and so is xmlattribute, xmltext, xmldocument, etc .). there is no performance implication of using one over the other at all, since xmlnode is simply the base class for all types of nodes in a dom xml document instance.

It just so happens, that pointer of the APIs in the DOM return an xmlnode reference because they cocould return several kinds of nodes. for example, with selectsinglenode (), your XPath expression cocould return an element, an attribute, an xmltext and what not; whether you handle it as an xmlnode or cast it to the right type is just a matter of how you write your code but won't affect performance at all.

Xmlelements are a type of node. in fact, if you look at the members of xmlnode and xmlelement in. net Framework, you will see that they are very much alike, but xmlelement has more going on. it inherits xmlnode and then is further customized. this is because an element is more specialized. A node is more general in scope. the document is a node, a processing instruction is a node, and so forth. elements are different. if you look at the xmlnodetype property of an element, you will see that it is element, one of the types of nodes you find.

Element is a subset of nodes. xmlnode represents a node, including xmlelement and xmlattribute. For example:

< Alarm lock = "true" > // Node
< Time > // Node
Stringvalue // Node
</ Time > // Node
</ Alarm > // Node

the above alarm (element node), lock (attribute node), time (element node), and stringvalue (text node) are all nodes, but only ...... and stringvalue are elements