REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties and has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from another document. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.
The authors of this document are the DOM Working Group members, different chapters may have different editors.
Comments on this document should be sent to the public mailing listwww-dom@w3.org.
A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found athttp://www.w3.org/TR.
The list of known errors in this document is found athttp://www.w3.org/DOM/updates/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001-errata.html.
The English version of this specification is the only normative version. However, for translations in other languages seehttp://www.w3.org/DOM/updates/REC-DOM-Level-1-translations.html.
This specification defines the Document Object Model Level 1, aplatform- and language-neutral interface that allowsprograms and scripts to dynamically access and update thecontent, structure and style of documents. The Document ObjectModel provides a standard set of objects for representing HTMLand XML documents, a standard model of how these objects canbe combined, and a standard interface for accessing andmanipulating them. Vendors can support the DOM as an interfaceto their proprietary data structures and APIs, and contentauthors can write to the standard DOM interfaces rather thanproduct-specific APIs, thus increasing interoperability on theWeb.
The goal of the DOM specification is to define a programmaticinterface for XML and HTML. The DOM Level 1 specification is separatedinto two parts: Core and HTML. The Core DOM Level 1 section provides a low-level set of fundamental interfaces that canrepresent any structured document, as well as defining extended interfaces for representing an XML document. These extended XML interfaces need not beimplemented by a DOM implementation that only provides access toHTML documents; all of the fundamental interfaces in the Core section mustbe implemented. A compliant DOM implementation that implements the extended XML interfaces is required to also implement the fundamental Coreinterfaces, but not the HTML interfaces.The HTML Level 1 section provides additional, higher-level interfaces that are used with the fundamental interfaces defined in the Core Level 1 section to provide a more convenient view of an HTML document. A compliant implementation of the HTML DOM implements all of the fundamental Core interfaces as well as theHTML interfaces.