Chapter 10

The Document Object Model

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding the DOM as a hierarchy of nodes
• Working with the various node types
• Coding the DOM around browser incompatibilities and gotchas

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for HTML and XML documents. The DOM represents a document as a hierarchical tree of nodes, allowing developers to add, remove, and modify individual parts of the page. Evolving out of early Dynamic HTML (DHTML) innovations from Netscape and Microsoft, the DOM is now a truly cross-platform, language-independent way of representing and manipulating pages for markup.

DOM Level 1 became a W3C recommendation in October 1998, providing interfaces for basic document structure and querying. This chapter focuses on the features and uses of DOM Level 1 as it relates to HTML pages in the browser and its implementation in JavaScript. The most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all have excellent DOM implementations.