Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 27. DOM Scripting

—by Aaron Gustafson

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an Application Programming Interface (API) for working with structured documents or, in layman’s terms, a means of accessing and manipulating the content of an HTML (or XML) file. The DOM is language agnostic and can be accessed by numerous languages, including C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This chapter, however, will focus solely on how JavaScript interfaces with the DOM. Though our main focus will be working with (X)HTML documents, many of these same techniques will work equally well on XML documents.