W3C recommends DOM 2

By Alun Williams

Posted on 10 Jan 2003 at 17:42

The Internet standards body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued another decree: DOM Level 2 HTML is a now an official W3C Recommendation.

This specifies a standard programming interface (API) to manipulate HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents and through a programming language, such as Java.

The status of W3C Recommendation means that a specification has been fully reviewed and the W3C favours its adoption by the rest of the industry.

What is DOM? Standing for Document Object Model, it is a platform- and language-neutral interface to allow computers to access information within a document. It allows programs or scripts to access the content, structure and style of documents. While this may sound straightforward, it requires a formalised specification to enable a wide range of applications running on different platforms 'to agree' on how to manage a document.

Other technologies that build on this DOM interface include Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

You can find the test suite used to prove the specification at w3c.org/DOM/Test/. It includes 500 test cases and is meant as an aid to developers.