JavaScript for Web Designers

Chapter 5. DOM Scripting

BEFORE WE CAN DO ANYTHING with a page, we have to first revisit something we touched on near the start: the Document Object Model. There are two purposes to the DOM: providing JavaScript with a map of all the elements on our page, and providing us with a set of methods for accessing those elements, their attributes, and their contents.

The “object” part of Document Object Model should make a lot more sense now than it did the first time the DOM came up, though: the DOM is a representation of a web page in the form of an object, made up of properties that represent each of the document’s child elements and subproperties ...