Appendix D. The XML Document Object Model

This appendix lists the interfaces in the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3. Examples showing how to use some of these interfaces appear in Chapter 11.

Unfortunately, the DOM Working Group defines too many "modules" for DOM functionality to be covered in this one appendix. In fact, at the time of writing, the W3C's site listed the following seven Technical Reports for different types of DOM activities:

  • The Core interfaces, which are the base set of interfaces used for working with HTML and XML documents

  • The Load and Save interfaces, which are used to load XML documents into a DOM (from a file, URI, stream, etc.) or save an XML document from a DOM (to a file, URI, stream, etc.)

  • The Validation interfaces, which are used to ensure that an XML document is valid, per its schema document(s)

  • The XPath interfaces, for accessing a DOM tree using XPath syntax

  • The Views and Formatting interfaces, which can be used to dynamically access and modify a document's structure, style, and contents

  • The Events interfaces, which allow for event handlers

  • The Abstract Schemas interfaces, which allow an interface to schema documents (DTD and XML Schema)

In addition, there is another Technical. Report on "DOM Requirements," which doesn't specifically list interfaces.

At the time of writing, only the Core, Load and Save, and Validation modules were full W3C Recommendations, so these are the modules covered in this appendix. Luckily, these are the ones that you are most likely ...

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