"The Microsoft® .NET Framework XmlReader class provides a very easy pull model for traversing XML data. From a more general point of view, though, XML is just one possible representation for hierarchical information. Thus, an XmlReader can be viewed as a class encapsulating just some arbitrary data structure. It "maps" this data structure/data format to the "XML world" with its nodes, elements and attributes. Now, if handling hierarchical information with an XmlReader is so easy, why not use XmlReader classes to access non-XML data? Why not, for example, transform portions of the file system to HTML using XSLT? Why not query a CSV file with XPath? With custom XmlReader classes this is easy to do."
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