DOM Glossary

Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or modified from similar definitions in other W3C documents. Links to these documents follow the definitions.

API

An API is an application programming interface, a set of functions or methods used to access some functionality.

content model

The content model is a simple grammar governing the allowed types of the child elements and the order in which they appear. [XML]

context

A context specifies an access pattern (or path): a set of interfaces which give you a way to interact with a model. For example, imagine a model with different colored arcs connecting data nodes. A context might be a sheet of colored acetate that is placed over the model allowing you a partial view of the total information in the model.

cooked model

A model for a document that represents the document after it has been manipulated in some way. For example, any combination of any of the following transformations would create a cooked model:

1. Expansion of internal text entities.
2. Expansion of external entities.
3. Model augmentation with style-specified generated text.
4. Execution of style-specified reordering.
5. Execution of scripts.

A browser might only be able to provide access to a cooked model, while an editor might provide access to a cooked or the initial structure model (also known as the uncooked model) for a document.

cursor

A cursor is an object representation of a node. It may possess information about context and the path traversed to reach the node.

ECMAScript

The programming language defined by the ECMA-262 standard. As stated in the standard, the originating technology for ECMAScript was JavaScript.

event propagation, also known as event bubbling

This is the idea that an event can affect one object and a set of related objects. Any of the potentially affected objects can block the event or substitute a different one (upward event propagation). The event is broadcast from the node at which it originates to every parent node.

HTML

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to another. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of applications. [HTML 3.2] [HTML 4.0]

IDL

An Interface Definition Language (IDL) is used to define the interfaces for accessing and operating upon objects. Examples of IDLs are the Object Management Group's IDL, Microsoft's IDL, and Sun's Java IDL.

initial structure model

Also known as the raw structure model or the uncooked model, this represents the document before it has been modified by entity expansions, generated text, style-specified reordering, or the execution of scripts. In some implementations, this might correspond to the "initial parse tree" for the document, if it ever exists. Note that a given implementation might not be able to provide access to the initial structure model for a document, though an editor probably would.

language binding

A programming language binding for an IDL specification is an implementation of the interfaces in the specification for the given language. For example, a Java language binding for the Document Object Model IDL specification would implement the concrete Java classes that provide the functionality exposed by the interfaces.

model

A model is the actual data representation for the information at hand. Examples are the structural model and the style model representing the parse structure and the style information associated with a document. The model might be a tree, or a directed graph, or something else.

root node

The root node is the unique node that is not a child of any other node. All other nodes are children or other descendents of the root node. [XML]

tag valid document

A document is tag valid if all begin and end tags are properly balanced and nested.

type valid document

A document is type valid if it conforms to an explicit DTD.

uncooked model

See initial structure model.

well-formed document

A document is well-formed of it is tag valid and entities are limited to single elements (i.e., single sub-trees).

XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely simple dialect of SGML which is completely described in this document. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. (XML)

Chair: Lauren Wood
W3C staff contact: Arnaud Le Hors
$Date: 1997/10/09 08:25:54 $