The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases.
This lesson focuses on the Streaming API for XML (StAX), a streaming Java technology-based, event-driven, pull-parsing API for reading and writing XML documents. StAX enables you to create bidirectional XML parsers that are fast, relatively easy to program, and have a light memory footprint.