Summary

The DOM is a W3C standard that describes how the structure of XML and HTML documents can be expressed as a native data structure within various programming languages. The DOM standard is language neutral, and implementations exist for a number of languages, including JavaScript, Java, C++, Perl, and Visual Basic. In this hour, you learned about the various interfaces that make up the DOM and how you can access data stored within the DOM structure from JavaScript. Even though the syntax of the language you use with the DOM might differ significantly from the syntax used in these JavaScript examples, the means of accessing the DOM will be basically the same. On the other hand, you may be quite content to stick with JavaScript as your language of choice for interacting with the DOM.