Chilkat XML offers a high-performance alternative to the standard XML DOM for creating, navigating, and manipulating XML documents. The Chilkat XML parser is faster and less memory intensive, and the API is much simpler. There is only one interface, which represents a single node in a parsed XML document. A node can contains a tag, attributes, content, and 0 or more child nodes.

The Chilkat XML parser is a non-validating parser, which is intentional for two reasons: to maximize performance, and to allow documents containing errors to be loaded and fixed. Chilkat XML contains a property, "ValidatingParser", which when set to TRUE causes Chilkat XML to use the standard Microsoft XML DOM parser, so you can compare the performance between the two or simply validate the XML if desired.

Chilkat XML is intended for use with data-oriented documents, and not for HTML-like documents that use XML to simply markup text.