Glossary
- Editors
- Arnaud Le Hors, W3C and IBM
- Lauren Wood, SoftQuad Software Inc.
- Robert S. Sutor, IBM Research (for DOM Level 1)
Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or modified
from similar definitions in other W3C or standards documents. See the links
within the definitions for more information.
- 16-bit unit
- The base unit of a
DOMString. This indicates that indexing on a DOMString occurs in units of 16 bits. This must not be misunderstood to mean that
a DOMString can store arbitrary 16-bit units. A DOMString is a character string encoded in UTF-16; this means that the
restrictions of UTF-16 as well as the other relevant restrictions on character
strings must be maintained. A single character, for example in the form of a
numeric character reference, may correspond to one or two 16-bit units.
For more information, see [Unicode] and
[ISO/IEC 10646]. - ancestor
- An ancestor node of any node A is any node above A in a
tree model of a document, where "above" means "toward the root."
- API
- An API is an application programming interface, a set
of functions or methods used to access some
functionality.
- child
- A child is an immediate descendant node of
a node.
- client application
- A [client] application is any software that uses the Document Object
Model programming interfaces provided by the hosting implementation to
accomplish useful work. Some examples of client applications are scripts within
an HTML or XML document.
- COM
- COM is Microsoft's Component Object Model
[COM], a technology for building applications from binary
software components.
- convenience
- A convenience method is an operation on an object that
could be accomplished by a program consisting of more basic operations on the
object. Convenience methods are usually provided to make the API
easier and simpler to use or to allow specific programs to create more
optimized implementations for common operations. A similar definition holds for
a convenience property.
- data model
- A data model is a collection of descriptions of data
structures and their contained fields, together with the operations or
functions that manipulate them.
- descendant
- A descendant node of any node A is any node below A in
a tree model of a document, where "above" means "toward the root."
- ECMAScript
- The programming language defined by the ECMA-262 standard
[ECMAScript]. As stated in the standard, the originating
technology for ECMAScript was JavaScript [JavaScript]. Note that
in the ECMAScript binding, the word "property" is used in the same
sense as the IDL term "attribute."
- element
- Each document contains one or more elements, the boundaries of which
are either delimited by start-tags and end-tags, or, for empty elements by an
empty-element tag. Each element has a type, identified by name, and may have a
set of attributes. Each attribute has a name and a value. See
Logical Structures in
XML [XML].
- information item
- An information item is an abstract representation of some component
of an XML document. See the [Infoset] for details.
- hosting implementation
- A [hosting] implementation is a software module that provides an
implementation of the DOM interfaces so that a client application can use them.
Some examples of hosting implementations are browsers, editors and document
repositories.
- 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.
[HTML4.0]
- inheritance
- In object-oriented programming, the ability to create new classes
(or interfaces) that contain all the methods and properties of another class
(or interface), plus additional methods and properties. If class (or interface)
D inherits from class (or interface) B, then D is said to be
derived from B. B is said to be a base class (or
interface) for D. Some programming languages allow for multiple inheritance,
that is, inheritance from more than one class or interface.
- interface
- An interface is a declaration of a set of
methods with no information given about their implementation. In
object systems that support interfaces and inheritance, interfaces can usually
inherit from one another.
- 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.
- local name
- A local name is the local part of a qualified
name. This is called the local part in Namespaces in XML
[Namespaces].
- method
- A method is an operation or function that is associated
with an object and is allowed to manipulate the object's data.
- 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.
- namespace prefix
- A namespace prefix is a string that associates an
element or attribute name with a namespace URI in XML. See
namespace prefix in
Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- namespace URI
- A namespace URI is a URI that identifies an XML
namespace. Strictly speaking, this actually is a namespace URI
reference. This is called the namespace name in Namespaces in XML
[Namespaces].
- object model
- An object model is a collection of descriptions of
classes or interfaces, together with their member data, member functions, and
class-static operations.
- parent
- A parent is an immediate ancestor node of
a node.
- qualified name
- A qualified name is the name of an element or attribute
defined as the concatenation of a local name (as defined in this
specification), optionally preceded by a namespace prefix and
colon character. See
Qualified
Names in Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- readonly node
- A readonly node is a node that is immutable. This means
its list of children, its content, and its attributes, when it is an element,
cannot be changed in any way. However, a readonly node can possibly be moved,
when it is not itself contained in a readonly node.
- 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
descendants of the root node. See
Well-Formed XML Documents in XML
[XML].
- sibling
- Two nodes are siblings if and only if they have the
same parent node.
- string comparison
- When string matching is required, it is to occur as though the
comparison was between 2 sequences of code points from the Unicode 3.0 standard
[Unicode].
- token
- An information item such as an
XML Name
which has been tokenized.
- tokenized
- The description given to various information items (for example,
attribute values of various types, but not including the StringType CDATA)
after having been processed by the XML processor. The process includes
stripping leading and trailing white space, and replacing multiple space
characters by one. See the definition of
tokenized
type.
- well-formed document
- A document is well-formed if it is tag valid and
entities are limited to single elements (i.e., single sub-trees). See
Well-Formed XML
Documents in XML [XML].
- XML
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely simple
dialect of SGML. 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
[XML] has been designed for ease of implementation and for
interoperability with both SGML and HTML.
- XML name
- See
XML name in the
XML specification [XML].
- XML namespace
- An XML namespace is a collection of names, identified
by a URI reference [RFC2396], which are used in XML documents as
element types and attribute names. [Namespaces]