January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
980 pages
28h 47m
English
Content preview from Ajax: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. Manipulating the DOM
Having an efficient method to send a request to the server and
pull back its response without having to refresh the whole page is very
important. It is only a small part of Ajax development, though. What is
more important to any Ajax web application is what is done with the data
the client receives. There’s a lot more work to do than just grabbing
the data, formatting it, and setting it equal to the innerHTML of an element. Understanding how the
HTML Document Object Model (DOM) works and how to manipulate it is of
utmost importance. I like to think that this—manipulating the DOM—is
where the magic of Ajax actually happens. This is what gives Ajax life
and allows application development on the Web.
The first key to understanding how the DOM works is to examine the structure of a DOM object. Then it will become clearer how the methods allow you to manipulate the DOM.
Understanding the DOM
The structure of any DOM object is its document tree. The document tree is made up of branches and leaves. Let’s look at a simple XHTML document, shown in Example 5-1, to clarify.
Example 5-1. A simple XHTML document
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>A Document tree example</title> </head> <body> <div id="body_content"> <h1>A Document tree example</h1> <p> This is just a <em>very</em> simple example. </p> </div> <div id="body_footer"> This ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.