Editing XML data binding (section)

==Difficulties==

Since XML is a document-oriented format and objects are (usually) not document-oriented, simple XML data binding mappings may ignore some of the structural information embedded in an XML document. Specifically, information such as [[comment (computer programming)|comment]]s, XML entity references, and sibling order may not be preserved in the object representation created by the binding application. However, this is not always the case; sufficiently powerful XML data binding tools are capable of preserving 100% of the information stored in an XML document.

Similarly, since objects residing in computer memory are not inherently sequentially stored, and may include links to other objects (including self-referential links), simple XML data binding mappings may not be capable of preserving all the information about an object when it is marshalled to XML. However, sufficiently powerful data binding tools perform graph structure analysis on objects residing in memory to marshall (cyclic) object graph structures in XML by utilizing standard XML reference attributes.