Document Object Model

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML and XML document. It provides a structured representation of the document, and defines a way to access the objects from programs or scripts so that they can change the document structure, style and content.

The DOM provides a representation of the document as a structured group of nodes and objects that have properties and methods. In short, the DOM connects web pages to scripts (such as JavaScript) or other programming languages.

A web page is a document. It can either be displayed in the browser window, or as the HTML source. Bot being the same document. It can also be viewed as a document tree, consisting of nodes and objects. This HTML file:

<html>
  <head>
    ...
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Title</h1>
    <p>
      Some <a>linked</a> text.
    </p>
    <p>
      And some unlinked text.
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

... would give this document tree:

In chapter 13 you will learn how to manipulate the DOM. This chapter is meant as a short introduction to the DOM concept, and makes you think about the HTML document as a tree structure. The content in this chapter is gathered from Mozilla Developer Network, there you can read more about DOM.

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