The basic XML object streams described in Chapter 4 provide one way to serialize C++ classes to and from XML documents.

The basic classes display two main characteristics: simplicity and efficiency. They use a single schema with predefined elements to meet the goal of simplicity; and they use a very simple parsing mechanism with limited error checking to meet the second goal of efficiency.

The basic streams are particularly well suited to persistence schemes, where the readability of the resulting document is of less concern than the efficiency of the mechanism.