What is the Document Object Model?

The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The document can be further processed and the results of that processing can be incorporated back into the presented page. The DOM is a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard. The DOM defines a standard for accessing documents like XML and HTML: "The W3C Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a document." The DOM is separated into 3 different parts / levels:

Core DOM - standard model for any structured document XML DOM - standard model for XML documents HTML DOM - standard model for HTML documents properties of all document elements, and

The DOM defines the objects and the methods (interface) to access them. What is the XML DOM? The XML DOM is:

A standard object model for XML A standard programming interface for XML Platform- and language-independent A W3C standard properties of all XML elements, and

The XML DOM defines the objects and the methods (interface) to access them.

In other words: The XML DOM is a standard for how to get, change, add, or delete XML elements. DOM Nodes According to the DOM, everything in an XML document is a node. The DOM says:

The entire document is a document node

Every XML element is an element node The text in the XML elements are text nodes Every attribute is an attribute node Comments are comment nodes

DOM Example Look at the following XML file (books.xml): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <bookstore> <book category="cooking"> <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title> <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author> <year>2005</year> <price>30.00</price> </book> <book category="children"> <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title> <author>J K. Rowling</author> <year>2005</year> <price>29.99</price> </book> <book category="web"> <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title> <author>James McGovern</author> <author>Per Bothner</author> <author>Kurt Cagle</author> <author>James Linn</author> <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author> <year>2003</year> <price>49.99</price> </book> <book category="web" cover="paperback"> <title lang="en">Learning XML</title> <author>Erik T. Ray</author> <year>2003</year> <price>39.95</price> </book> </bookstore> The root node in the XML above is named <bookstore>. All other nodes in the document are contained within <bookstore>. The root node <bookstore> holds four <book> nodes.

The first <book> node holds four nodes: <title>, <author>, <year>, and <price>, which contains one text node each, "Everyday Italian", "Giada De Laurentiis", "2005", and "30.00". Text is Always Stored in Text Nodes A common error in DOM processing is to expect an element node to contain text. However, the text of an element node is stored in a text node. In this example: <year>2005</year>, the element node <year>, holds a text node with the value "2005". "2005" is not the value of the <year> element! The XML DOM Node Tree The XML DOM views an XML document as a tree-structure. The tree structure is called a nodetree. All nodes can be accessed through the tree. Their contents can be modified or deleted, and new elements can be created. The node tree shows the set of nodes, and the connections between them. The tree starts at the root node and branches out to the text nodes at the lowest level of the tree:

The image above represents the XML file books.xml.

Node Parents, Children, and Siblings The nodes in the node tree have a hierarchical relationship to each other. The terms parent, child, and sibling are used to describe the relationships. Parent nodes have children. Children on the same level are called siblings (brothers or sisters).

In a node tree, the top node is called the root Every node, except the root, has exactly one parent node A node can have any number of children A leaf is a node with no children Siblings are nodes with the same parent

The following image illustrates a part of the node tree and the relationship between the nodes:

Because the XML data is structured in a tree form, it can be traversed without knowing the exact structure of the tree and without knowing the type of data contained within. First Child - Last Child Look at the following XML fragment: <bookstore> <book category="cooking"> <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title> <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>

<year>2005</year> <price>30.00</price> </book> </bookstore> In the XML above, the <title> element is the first child of the <book> element, and the <price> element is the last child of the <book> element. Furthermore, the <book> element is the parent node of the <title>, <author>, <year>, and <price> elements. XML Parser The XML DOM contains methods (functions) to traverse XML trees, access, insert, and delete nodes. However, before an XML document can be accessed and manipulated, it must be loaded into an XML DOM object. An XML parser reads XML, and converts it into an XML DOM object that can be accessed with JavaScript. Most browsers have a built-in XML parser.