W3C WD-DOM-19980720


Level 1 Document Object Model Specification

Version 1.0

W3C Working Draft 20 July, 1998

This version

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-DOM-19980720
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-DOM-19980720/DOM.ps
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-DOM-19980720/DOM.tgz
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-DOM-19980720/DOM.zip

Previous versions

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-DOM-19980416
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM-19980318
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM-971209
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM-971009

Latest version

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM

WG Chair

Lauren Wood, SoftQuad, Inc.

Editors

Vidur Apparao, Netscape
Steve Byrne, JavaSoft
Mike Champion, ArborText
Scott Isaacs, Microsoft
Gavin Nicol, Inso EPS
Jonathan Robie, Texcel Research
Robert Sutor, IBM
Chris Wilson, Microsoft
Lauren Wood, SoftQuad, Inc.

Principal Contributors

Vidur Apparao, Netscape
Steve Byrne, JavaSoft (until November 1997)
Mike Champion, ArborText, Inc.
Scott Isaacs, Microsoft (until January, 1998)
Arnaud Le Hors, W3C
Gavin Nicol, Inso EPS
Jonathan Robie, Texcel Research
Peter Sharpe, SoftQuad, Inc.
Bill Smith, Sun (after November 1997)
Jared Sorensen, Novell
Robert Sutor, IBM
Ray Whitmer, iMall
Chris Wilson, Microsoft (after January, 1998)

Status

This is a W3C Working Draft for review by W3C members and other interested parties. It is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C Working Drafts as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress". This is work in progress and does not imply endorsement by, or the consensus of, either W3C or members of the DOM working group.

This document has been produced as part of the W3C DOM Activity , and is intended as a draft of a proposed recommendation for the Document Object Model. The authors of this document are the DOM WG members. Different chapters of the Document Object Model specification may have different editors.

We will update this draft specification on a regular basis.

The DOM WG believes that the specification is very close to being ready for Proposed Recommendation status.

Please send detailed comments on this document to w3c-dom-ig@w3.org . We cannot guarantee a personal response but we will try when it is appropriate. Public discussion about the DOM takes place on the www-dom@w3.org mailing list.

The list of known errors in this document is found at http://www.w3.org/DOM/1998/WD-DOM-19980720-errata.html .


Abstract

This specification defines Level 1 of the Document Object Model, 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 Object Model provides a standard set of objects for representing HTML and XML documents, a standard model of how these objects can be combined, and a standard interface for accessing and manipulating them. Vendors can support the DOM as an interface to their proprietary data structures and APIs, and content authors can write to the standard DOM interfaces rather than product-specific APIs, thus increasing interoperability on the Web.

The goal of the DOM specification is to define a programmatic interface for XML and HTML. The Level 1 DOM specification is separated into two parts: Core and HTML. The Level 1 Core DOM specification provides a low-level set of fundamental interfaces that can represent any structured document, as well as defining extended interfaces for representing an XML document. These extended XML interfaces need not be implemented by a DOM implementation that only provides access to HTML documents; all of the fundamental interfaces in the Core document must be implemented. A compliant DOM implementation that implements the extended XML interfaces is required to also implement the fundamental Core interfaces, but not the HTML interfaces. The Level 1 HTML specification provides additional, higher-level interfaces that are used with the fundamental interfaces defined in the Level 1 Core specification to provide a more convenient view of an HTML document. A compliant implementation of the HTML DOM will implement all of the fundamental Core interfaces as well as the HTML interfaces.

Languages used

English, OMG IDL, Java, ECMAScript

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