A for Ajax, Part 6: The Document Object Model [DOM]

What is the DOM?
The W3C Recommendation defines it as: “The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for valid HTML and well-formed XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated. In the DOM specification, the term "document" is used in the broad sense - increasingly, XML is being used as a way of representing many different kinds of information that may be stored in diverse systems, and much of this would traditionally be seen as data rather than as documents. Nevertheless, XML presents this data as documents, and the DOM may be used to manage this data.”

What can be done with the DOM?
From the W3C Recommendation: “With the Document Object Model, programmers can build documents, navigate their structure, and add, modify, or delete elements and content. Anything found in an HTML or XML document can be accessed, changed, deleted, or added using the Document Object Model, with a few exceptions..”

You can read the article online here.

Code download
You can download the DOMNavigation.zip here. The JavaScript code has examples of:
-navigating and manipulating the DOM
-object detection
-a way to create a tree representation of the DOM. We will improve upon this code in our next post on DOM events