Link: bskool bloggin: icemountain: To parse or not to parse....
but I think to answer Icemountain's question in his post icemountain: To parse or not to parse... that parser is a general term used in computer science to talk about something that dissects source code
and turns it into object code.
I would pretty much agree with this comment except for the little part I crossed out. A parser just goes through and parses (reads in and dissects) the document; there is no conversion to executable code. In the case of XML, the parser reads in the document and creates something called a Document Object Model, i.e., the tree-like document structure shown in the Learning XML chapter from O'Reilly.