In the Understanding web development and technologies section in Chapter 1, Web Scraping Fundamentals, we introduced XML as a document that contains data that is exchangeable and distributable across various technologies related to the web and documents. XML carries user-defined tags, also known as nodes, which hold data in a tree-like structure.
A tree-type structure (also known as an element-tree) is a base model for most markup languages and is often referred to as the Document Object Model (DOM). With the help of the DOM and its defined conventions, we can access, traverse, and manipulate elements.
Elements are structured inside some parent elements, which are inside their own parent and so on; this describes a parent-child relationship that is the most significant feature of markup language. Many applications that support XML or markup...