3.2DocumentObjectModel(DOM).ppt

SDPL 2002 Notes 3.2: Document Object Model 3.2 Document Object Model (DOM) How to provide uniform access to structured documents in diverse applications (parsers, browsers, editors, databases)? Overview of W3C DOM Specification second one in the “XML-family” of recommendations Level 1, W3C Rec, Oct. 1998 Level 2, W3C Rec, Nov. 2000 Level 3, W3C Working Draft (January 2002) What does DOM specify, and how to use it? DOM: What is it? An object-based, language-neutral API for XML and HTML documents allows programs and scripts to build documents, navigate their structure, add, modify or delete elements and content Provides a foundation for developing  querying, filtering,  transformation, rendering etc. applications on top of DOM implementations In contrast to “Serial Access XML” could think as “Directly Obtainable in Memory” DOM structure model Based on O-O concepts: methods (to access or change object’s state) interfaces (declaration of a set of methods) objects (encapsulation of data and methods) Roughly similar to the XSLT/XPath data model (to be discussed later) ? a parse tree Tree-like structure implied by the abstract relationships defined by the programming interfaces; Does not necessarily reflect data structures used by an implementation (but probably does) Structure of DOM Level 1 I: DOM Core Interfaces Fundamental interfaces basic interfaces to structured documents Extended interfaces XML specific: CDATASection, DocumentType, Notation, Entity, EntityReference, ProcessingInstruction II: DOM HTML Interfaces more convenient to access HTML documents (we ignore these) DOM Level 2 Level 1: basic representation and manipulation of document structure and content (No access to the contents of a DTD) DOM Level 2 adds support for namespaces accessing elements by ID attribute values optional features interfaces to document views and style sheets an event model (for, say, user actions on elements) methods for traversing the document tree and manipulating r