Document Object Model

Specification of a standard framework for creating object-oriented documents devised by the W3C. DOM allows a Web page - a document - to be treated as a container for holding a number of objects. Each object is seen as a node in a tree, with each document having a parent or root node and any number of child nodes. An object might be a comment, a processing instruction (PI), a piece of text, or any other item. In an HTML or XML version of this dictionary, for example, the book would be the parent, headwords are child nodes, and definitions are child nodes of headwords. A processing instruction might be used to display all headwords in bold type. The hope is that DOM will provide a structure for the Web, which is, at the moment, just tens of millions of words of barely-connected text. In any event, it is much easier to use scripting languages and intelligent software to manipulate containers of named objects than to do everything using tags.