What Is the Document Object Model?

The DOM is a platform and programming language independent standard that was developed to provide a programming API that supports both HTML and XML documents. The DOM was originally developed as a specification to enhance the portability of JavaScript scripts and Java applications between different web browsers. Early members of the DOM working group had a lot of hands-on experience with Standard General Markup Language (SGML), and they influenced the direction of the standard development. Thanks to all their hard work, the DOM developers have built an API that allows us to add, delete, retrieve, and modify the contents of XML and HTML documents. Of course, this chapter focuses strictly on XML documents.

Note

For additional information on the DOM, please see http://www.w3.org/DOM/.

One important concept to keep in mind is that the DOM is programming language independent. It specifies the structure of a document and methods for accessing the document, but doesn't specify any implementation details ” they're left up to the individual developers. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the DOM-based Perl XML parser modules.