PR-DOM-Level-1-19980818
PR-DOM-Level-1-19980818This document is currently undergoing review by the members of the World Wide Web Consortium. It is a stable document derived from a series of working drafts produced over the last year as deliverables of the W3C DOM Activity. Details of this review have been distributed to the Member's representatives.
The review period will end on 15 September, 1998 at 24:00 GMT. Within 14 days from that time, the document's disposition will be announced: it may become a W3C Recommendation (possibly with minor changes), or it may revert to Working Draft status, or it may be dropped as a W3C work item.
As a Proposed Recommendation, this document does not imply any endorsement by the Consortium's staff or Member organizations.
Comments on this document by non-Members should be sent to www-dom@w3.org. We cannot guarantee a personal response but we will try when it is appropriate.
The authors of this document are the DOM WG members, different chapters may have different editors.
This specification defines the Document Object Model Level 1, a platform- and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The Document Object Model provides a standard set of objects for representing HTML and XML documents, a standard model of how these objects can be combined, and a standard interface for accessing and manipulating them. Vendors can support the DOM as an interface to their proprietary data structures and APIs, and content authors can write to the standard DOM interfaces rather than product-specific APIs, thus increasing interoperability on the Web.
The goal of the DOM specification is to define a programmatic interface for XML and HTML. The DOM Level 1 specification is separated into two parts: Core and HTML. The Core DOM Level 1 section provides a low-level set of fundamental interfaces that can represent any structured document, as well as defining extended interfaces for representing an XML document. These extended XML interfaces need not be implemented by a DOM implementation that only provides access to HTML documents; all of the fundamental interfaces in the Core section must be implemented. A compliant DOM implementation that implements the extended XML interfaces is required to also implement the fundamental Core interfaces, but not the HTML interfaces. The HTML Level 1 section provides additional, higher-level interfaces that are used with the fundamental interfaces defined in the Core Level 1 section to provide a more convenient view of an HTML document. A compliant implementation of the HTML DOM implements all of the fundamental Core interfaces as well as the HTML interfaces.