At-A-Glance: XmlReader vs. XPathNavigator vs. XmlDocument

April 9, 2003 3:19 PM Comments [0] Posted in Web Services | XML

This is a great at-a-glance view of the XML options that .NET makes available to Developers. [From Aaron Skonnard's article by way of Don Box]

CHOICES	PROS	CONS
XmlTextReader	-Fastest -Most efficient (memory) -Extensible	-Forward-only -Read-only -Requires manual validation
XmlValidatingReader	-Automatic validation -Run-time type info -Relatively fast & efficient (compared to DOM)	-2 to 3x slower than XmlTextReader -Forward-only -Read-only
XmlDocument (DOM)	-Full traversal -Read/write -XPath expressions	-2 to 3x slower than XmlTextReader/XmlValidatingReader -More overhead than XmlTextReader/XmlValidatingReader
XPathNavigator	-Full traversal -XPath expressions -XSLT integration -Extensible	-Read-only -Not as familiar as DOM
XPathDocument	-Faster than XmlDocument -Optimized for XPath/XSLT	-Slower than XmlTextReader