using XML to save menus?!?!

[Brandybuck]

what is preferable...SAX or DOM and why?

It's largely up to you, and is a matter of preference. They are two distinct ways of interacting with XML. I personally prefer DOM because I can treat the XML as a data structure, instead of a stream of events.

[wysota]

DOM will be better in this case. In is superior to SAX in its capabilities and its only drawback is that the whole tree has to be loaded into memory (which is not the case with SAX). But I guess you won't have a dozen megabyte tree for your menus so it's not a drawback in your case.