XML parser???

Hi,
i am new to XML and need ur clarification.
i am really getting confused about what a "XML parser" is and what it does? in some books, i read that many free parsers are available on the net while some books say that IE iitself is a parser.
i also want to know what DOM and SAX are and how are they related to a "parser". is DOM/SAX a separate software???
i am really getting confused whenever i read articles/books on XML.
thanks in advance

Here's my understanding ...

XML is a form of data storage. You need to parse this data from the XML tags to use it. An XML parser is basically anything that is capable of extracting the data from the XML file in some way. This includes most web browsers (that's all I've ever used). You can use XSL to display XML data in whatever format you choose. I'm assuming that a "free parser available on the net" would be a program that shows XML data in a tree format or something like that. I'm sure Google can shed some more light on that particular subject.

Visit w3schools.com for a good start on XML+XSL.

An XML parser is a tool/program/piece of software for
parsing documents which comply with the XML
specification.

There are a number of ways (paradigms/processing models)
to access data stored in XML documents. The two principal
(or common) ways are SAX and DOM.

SAX is an event-oriented paradigm. The parser reads an
XML document sequentially and issues calls to event
handlers to process each element of the document as it is
encountered.

DOM is an object-oriented paradigm. The parser reads in
all of the XML document and creates a document object
(result tree). You then process the data by traversing
the result tree.

Which paradigm is better depends on the problem at hand.
For large documents, it is generally better to use SAX