Document Object Model (DOM)

The Document Object Model (DOM) connects web pages to scripts or programming languages. Usually that means JavaScript, although modelling HTML, SVG, or XML documents as objects is not part of the JavaScript language, as such.

The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree; with them you can change the document's structure, style, or content. Nodes can also have event handlers attached to them; once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.

An introduction to the DOM is available.

The Document Object Model has been highly simplified. To achieve this, the following interfaces present in the different DOM level 3 or earlier specifications have been removed. It is uncertain whether some may be reintroduced in the future or not, but for the time being they should be considered obsolete and should be avoided:

A document containing HTML is described using the Document (en-US) interface, which is extended by the HTML specification to include various HTML-specific features.

An HTML document object also gives access to various features of browsers like the tab or the window, in which a page is drawn using the Window interface, the Style associated to it (usually CSS), the history of the browser relative to the context, History (en-US). Eventually, Selection (en-US) is done on the document.

Here are the DOM APIs for data types used in the definitions of SVG properties and attributes.

Static type

Animated type

• DOM Examples
• CSS Object Model (CSSOM)