These elements may also have specific interfaces for dealing with the kind of data those elements hold, as in the table object example in the previous section. Element inherits from the generic Node interface, and together these two interfaces provide many of the methods and properties you use on individual elements. In simple terms, the window object represents something like the browser, and the document object is the root of the document itself. The document and window objects are the objects whose interfaces you generally use most often in DOM programming. These common APIs are used in the longer examples in the DOM Examples chapter at the end of this book. The idea is not to describe what these APIs do here but to give you an idea of the sorts of methods and properties you will see very often as you use the DOM. This section lists some of the most commonly-used interfaces in the DOM. You'll find these terms and others to be introduced and used throughout the documentation. It's common to refer to any Attr node as an attribute, for example, and to refer to an array of DOM nodes as a nodeList. There are also some common terminology considerations to keep in mind. Purpose, and you can also add and remove items from a NamedNodeMap has an item() method for this AttributesĪre nodes in the DOM just like elements are, though you may rarely useĪ namedNodeMap is like an array, but the items are accessedīy name or index, though this latter case is merely a convenience forĮnumeration, as they are in no particular order in the list. When an attribute is returned by a member (e.g., by theĬreateAttribute() method), it is an object reference thatĮxposes a special (albeit small) interface for attributes. Typical array syntax to fetch the second item in the list. NodeList are accessed by index in either of two ways: Other interfaces describing capabilities of specific kinds of elementsĪ nodeList is an array of elements, like the kind that is HTML DOM API's HTMLElement interface as well as In an HTML document, elements are further enhanced by the Node interface, both of which are included together in this

Returns the element that has just been created in the DOM.Įlement interface and also the more basic

Object reference to a node, we just say that this method Rather than saying, for example, that theĭocument.createElement() method returns an To an element or a node of type element returned by a HTML document, an object can be an element node but also a text node or OwnerDocument property of an element returns theĭocument to which it belongs), this object is the rootĮvery object located within a document is a node of some kind. When a member returns an object of type document (e.g., the The following table briefly describes these data types. Note: Because the vast majority of code that uses the DOM revolves around manipulating HTML documents, it's common to refer to the nodes in the DOM as elements, although strictly speaking not every node is an element. The DOM was designed to be independent of any particular programming language, making the structural representation of the document available from a single, consistent API.Įven if most web developers will only use the DOM through JavaScript, implementations of the DOM can be built for any language, as this Python example demonstrates: JavaScript can also be used in other contexts.įor example, Node.js runs JavaScript programs on a computer,Īnd the DOM API is not a core part of the Node.js runtime. The DOM is not part of the JavaScript language,īut is instead a Web API used to build websites. They can all be accessed and manipulated using the DOM and a scripting language like JavaScript. The document as a whole, the head, tables within the document, table headers, text within the table cells, and all other elements in a document are parts of the document object model for that document. The DOM is not a programming language, but without it, the JavaScript language wouldn't have any model or notion of web pages, HTML documents, SVG documents, and their component parts. That is to say, it is written in JavaScript, but uses the DOM to access the document and its elements. The previous short example, like nearly all examples, is JavaScript.

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