Chapter 13. The Document Object Model
When you open a web page in your browser, the browser retrieves the page’s HTML text and parses it, much like the way our parser from Chapter 11 parsed programs. The browser builds up a model of the document’s structure and then uses this model to draw the page on the screen.
This representation of the document is one of the toys that a JavaScript program has available in its sandbox. You can read from the model and also change it. It acts as a live data structure: when it is modified, the page on the screen updates to reflect the changes.
Document Structure
You can imagine an HTML document as a nested set of boxes. Tags such as <body>
and </body>
enclose other tags, which in turn contain other tags or text. ...
Get Eloquent JavaScript, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.