Note: Many topics at this site are reduced versions of the text in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications." Search results will not be as extensive as a search of the book's CD-ROM.

DOM is an API (application programming interface) for HTML and XML documents. The W3C (World Wide Web Coalition) created DOM in 1998 with the intention of giving programmers a way to write programs that work the same way on all browsers. DOM provides a programming model that allows programmers to use whatever programming language they prefer.

DOM defines logical structure for documents, which are in most cases documents with data represented by XML. These XML documents contain elements and content that can be accessed, changed, deleted, or added using the Document Object Model. The term DHTML (Dynamic HTML) is often used to refer to HTML documents with scripts and programs that can make changes to the style, structure, and content of Web pages.

The name comes from the fact that DOM is an "object model" in which documents are modeled with objects. The model encompasses the structure and the behavior of documents.

Copyright (c) 2001 Tom Sheldon and Big Sur Multimedia.
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