I understand that in the Java DOM www.w3c.dom.*; everything in an xml document is treated as a Node. However,setTextContent and getTextContent are too powerful, parsing the tree deeply or overwriting nodes. In the case of this: contents with Node node pointing to the fred Element, is the value of node.getValue()=="contents" ? Edited by: Zac1234 on Jan 23, 2009 4:55 PM