This section defines a set of objects and interfaces for accessing and manipulating document objects. The functionality specified in this section (the Core functionality) is sufficient to allow software developers and web script authors to access and manipulate parsed HTML and XML content inside conforming products. The DOM Core API also allows creation and population of a Document object using only DOM API calls; loading a Document and saving it persistently is left to the product that implements the DOM API.
The DOM presents documents as a hierarchy of Node objects that also implement other, more specialized interfaces. Some types of nodes may have child nodes of various types, and others are leaf nodes that cannot have anything below them in the document structure. For XML and HTML, the node types, and which node types they may have as children, are as follows:
The DOM also specifies a NodeList interface to handle ordered lists of Nodes, such as the children of a Node, or the elements returned by the getElementsByTagName method of the Element interface, and also a NamedNodeMap interface to handle unordered sets of nodes referenced by their name attribute, such as the attributes of an Element. NodeList and NamedNodeMap objects in the DOM are live; that is, changes to the underlying document structure are reflected in all relevant NodeList and NamedNodeMap objects. For example, if a DOM user gets a NodeList object containing the children of an Element, then subsequently adds more children to that element (or removes children, or modifies them), those changes are automatically reflected in the NodeList, without further action on the user's part. Likewise, changes to a Node in the tree are reflected in all references to that Node in NodeList and NamedNodeMap objects.
Finally, the interfaces Text, Comment, and CDATASection all inherit from the CharacterData interface.
Most of the APIs defined by this specification are interfaces rather than classes. That means that an implementation need only expose methods with the defined names and specified operation, not implement classes that correspond directly to the interfaces. This allows the DOM APIs to be implemented as a thin veneer on top of legacy applications with their own data structures, or on top of newer applications with different class hierarchies. This also means that ordinary constructors (in the Java or C++ sense) cannot be used to create DOM objects, since the underlying objects to be constructed may have little relationship to the DOM interfaces. The conventional solution to this in object-oriented design is to define factory methods that create instances of objects that implement the various interfaces. Objects implementing some interface "X" are created by a "createX()" method on the Document interface; this is because all DOM objects live in the context of a specific Document.
The DOM Level 2 API does not define a standard way to create DOMImplementation objects; DOM implementations must provide some proprietary way of bootstrapping these DOM interfaces, and then all other objects can be built from there.
The Core DOM APIs are designed to be compatible with a wide range of languages, including both general-user scripting languages and the more challenging languages used mostly by professional programmers. Thus, the DOM APIs need to operate across a variety of memory management philosophies, from language bindings that do not expose memory management to the user at all, through those (notably Java) that provide explicit constructors but provide an automatic garbage collection mechanism to automatically reclaim unused memory, to those (especially C/C++) that generally require the programmer to explicitly allocate object memory, track where it is used, and explicitly free it for re-use. To ensure a consistent API across these platforms, the DOM does not address memory management issues at all, but instead leaves these for the implementation. Neither of the explicit language bindings defined by the DOM API (for ECMAScript and Java) require any memory management methods, but DOM bindings for other languages (especially C or C++) may require such support. These extensions will be the responsibility of those adapting the DOM API to a specific language, not the DOM Working Group.
While it would be nice to have attribute and method names that are short, informative, internally consistent, and familiar to users of similar APIs, the names also should not clash with the names in legacy APIs supported by DOM implementations. Furthermore, both OMG IDL and ECMAScript have significant limitations in their ability to disambiguate names from different namespaces that make it difficult to avoid naming conflicts with short, familiar names. So, DOM names tend to be long and descriptive in order to be unique across all environments.
The Working Group has also attempted to be internally consistent in its use of various terms, even though these may not be common distinctions in other APIs. For example, the DOM API uses the method name "remove" when the method changes the structural model, and the method name "delete" when the method gets rid of something inside the structure model. The thing that is deleted is not returned. The thing that is removed may be returned, when it makes sense to return it.
The DOM Core APIs present two somewhat different sets of interfaces to an XML/HTML document: one presenting an "object oriented" approach with a hierarchy of inheritance, and a "simplified" view that allows all manipulation to be done via the Node interface without requiring casts (in Java and other C-like languages) or query interface calls in COM environments. These operations are fairly expensive in Java and COM, and the DOM may be used in performance-critical environments, so we allow significant functionality using just the Node interface. Because many other users will find the inheritance hierarchy easier to understand than the "everything is a Node" approach to the DOM, we also support the full higher-level interfaces for those who prefer a more object-oriented API.
In practice, this means that there is a certain amount of redundancy in the API. The Working Group considers the "inheritance" approach the primary view of the API, and the full set of functionality on Node to be "extra" functionality that users may employ, but that does not eliminate the need for methods on other interfaces that an object-oriented analysis would dictate. (Of course, when the O-O analysis yields an attribute or method that is identical to one on the Node interface, we don't specify a completely redundant one.) Thus, even though there is a generic nodeName attribute on the Node interface, there is still a tagName attribute on the Element interface; these two attributes must contain the same value, but the it is worthwhile to support both, given the different constituencies the DOM API must satisfy.
To ensure interoperability, the DOM specifies the following:
A DOMString is a sequence of 16-bit units.
Note: Even though the DOM defines the name of the string type to be DOMString, bindings may use different names. For example for Java, DOMString is bound to the String type because it also uses UTF-16 as its encoding.
Note: As of August 2000, the OMG IDL specification ([OMGIDL]) included a wstring type. However, that definition did not meet the interoperability criteria of the DOM API since it relied on negotiation to decide the width and encoding of a character.
To ensure interoperability, the DOM specifies the following:
A DOMTimeStamp represents a number of milliseconds.
Note: Even though the DOM uses the type DOMTimeStamp, bindings may use different types. For example for Java, DOMTimeStamp is bound to the long type. In ECMAScript, TimeStamp is bound to the Date type because the range of the integer type is too small.
The DOM has many interfaces that imply string matching. HTML processors generally assume an uppercase (less often, lowercase) normalization of names for such things as elements, while XML is explicitly case sensitive. For the purposes of the DOM, string matching is performed purely by binary comparison of the 16-bit units of the DOMString. In addition, the DOM assumes that any case normalizations take place in the processor, before the DOM structures are built.
Note: Besides case folding, there are additional normalizations that can be applied to text. The W3C I18N Working Group is in the process of defining exactly which normalizations are necessary, and where they should be applied. The W3C I18N Working Group expects to require early normalization, which means that data read into the DOM is assumed to already be normalized. The DOM and applications built on top of it in this case only have to assure that text remains normalized when being changed. For further details, please see [Charmod].
The DOM Level 2 supports XML namespaces [Namespaces] by augmenting several interfaces of the DOM Level 1 Core to allow creating and manipulating elements and attributes associated to a namespace.
As far as the DOM is concerned, special attributes used for declaring XML namespaces are still exposed and can be manipulated just like any other attribute. However, nodes are permanently bound to namespace URIs as they get created. Consequently, moving a node within a document, using the DOM, in no case results in a change of its namespace prefix or namespace URI. Similarly, creating a node with a namespace prefix and namespace URI, or changing the namespace prefix of a node, does not result in any addition, removal, or modification of any special attributes for declaring the appropriate XML namespaces. Namespace validation is not enforced; the DOM application is responsible. In particular, since the mapping between prefixes and namespace URIs is not enforced, in general, the resulting document cannot be serialized naively. For example, applications may have to declare every namespace in use when serializing a document.
DOM Level 2 doesn't perform any URI normalization or canonicalization. The URIs given to the DOM are assumed to be valid (e.g., characters such as whitespaces are properly escaped), and no lexical checking is performed. Absolute URI references are treated as strings and compared literally. How relative namespace URI references are treated is undefined. To ensure interoperability only absolute namespace URI references (i.e., URI references beginning with a scheme name and a colon) should be used. Note that because the DOM does no lexical checking, the empty string will be treated as a real namespace URI in DOM Level 2 methods. Applications must use the value null as the namespaceURI parameter for methods if they wish to have no namespace.
Note: In the DOM, all namespace declaration attributes are by definition bound to the namespace URI: "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/". These are the attributes whose namespace prefix or qualified name is "xmlns". Although, at the time of writing, this is not part of the XML Namespaces specification [Namespaces], it is planned to be incorporated in a future revision.
In a document with no namespaces, the child list of an EntityReference node is always the same as that of the corresponding Entity. This is not true in a document where an entity contains unbound namespace prefixes. In such a case, the descendants of the corresponding EntityReference nodes may be bound to different namespace URIs, depending on where the entity references are. Also, because, in the DOM, nodes always remain bound to the same namespace URI, moving such EntityReference nodes can lead to documents that cannot be serialized. This is also true when the DOM Level 1 method createEntityReference of the Document interface is used to create entity references that correspond to such entities, since the descendants of the returned EntityReference are unbound. The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve namespace prefixes. For all of these reasons, use of such entities and entity references should be avoided or used with extreme care. A future Level of the DOM may include some additional support for handling these.
The new methods, such as createElementNS and createAttributeNS of the Document interface, are meant to be used by namespace aware applications. Simple applications that do not use namespaces can use the DOM Level 1 methods, such as createElement and createAttribute. Elements and attributes created in this way do not have any namespace prefix, namespace URI, or local name.
Note: DOM Level 1 methods are namespace ignorant. Therefore, while it is safe to use these methods when not dealing with namespaces, using them and the new ones at the same time should be avoided. DOM Level 1 methods solely identify attribute nodes by their nodeName. On the contrary, the DOM Level 2 methods related to namespaces, identify attribute nodes by their namespaceURI and localName. Because of this fundamental difference, mixing both sets of methods can lead to unpredictable results. In particular, using setAttributeNS, an element may have two attributes (or more) that have the same nodeName, but different namespaceURIs. Calling getAttribute with that nodeName could then return any of those attributes. The result depends on the implementation. Similarly, using setAttributeNode, one can set two attributes (or more) that have different nodeNames but the same prefix and namespaceURI. In this case getAttributeNodeNS will return either attribute, in an implementation dependent manner. The only guarantee in such cases is that all methods that access a named item by its nodeName will access the same item, and all methods which access a node by its URI and local name will access the same node. For instance, setAttribute and setAttributeNS affect the node that getAttribute and getAttributeNS, respectively, return.
The interfaces within this section are considered fundamental, and must be fully implemented by all conforming implementations of the DOM, including all HTML DOM implementations [DOM Level 2 HTML], unless otherwise specified.
A DOM application may use the hasFeature(feature, version) method of the DOMImplementation interface with parameter values "Core" and "2.0" (respectively) to determine whether or not this module is supported by the implementation. Any implementation that conforms to DOM Level 2 or a DOM Level 2 module must conform to the Core module. Please refer to additional information about conformance in this specification.
Exception DOMExceptionDOM operations only raise exceptions in "exceptional" circumstances, i.e., when an operation is impossible to perform (either for logical reasons, because data is lost, or because the implementation has become unstable). In general, DOM methods return specific error values in ordinary processing situations, such as out-of-bound errors when using NodeList.
Implementations should raise other exceptions under other circumstances. For example, implementations should raise an implementation-dependent exception if a null argument is passed.
Some languages and object systems do not support the concept of exceptions. For such systems, error conditions may be indicated using native error reporting mechanisms. For some bindings, for example, methods may return error codes similar to those listed in the corresponding method descriptions.
An integer indicating the type of error generated.
Note: Other numeric codes are reserved for W3C for possible future use.
Defined Constants DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR If the specified range of text does not fit into a DOMString HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR If any node is inserted somewhere it doesn't belong INDEX_SIZE_ERR If index or size is negative, or greater than the allowed value INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR If an attempt is made to add an attribute that is already in use elsewhere INVALID_ACCESS_ERR, introduced in DOM Level 2. If a parameter or an operation is not supported by the underlying object. INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR If an invalid or illegal character is specified, such as in a name. See production 2 in the XML specification for the definition of a legal character, and production 5 for the definition of a legal name character. INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR, introduced in DOM Level 2. If an attempt is made to modify the type of the underlying object. INVALID_STATE_ERR, introduced in DOM Level 2. If an attempt is made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable. NAMESPACE_ERR, introduced in DOM Level 2. If an attempt is made to create or change an object in a way which is incorrect with regard to namespaces. NOT_FOUND_ERR If an attempt is made to reference a node in a context where it does not exist NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR If the implementation does not support the requested type of object or operation. NO_DATA_ALLOWED_ERR If data is specified for a node which does not support data NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR If an attempt is made to modify an object where modifications are not allowed SYNTAX_ERR, introduced in DOM Level 2. If an invalid or illegal string is specified. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR If a node is used in a different document than the one that created it (that doesn't support it) Interface DOMImplementationThe DOMImplementation interface provides a number of methods for performing operations that are independent of any particular instance of the document object model.
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name contains an illegal character. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is malformed, if the qualifiedName has a prefix and the namespaceURI is null, or if the qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" [Namespaces]. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if doctype has already been used with a different document or was created from a different implementation. |
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A new DocumentType node with Node.ownerDocument set to null. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name contains an illegal character. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is malformed. |
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boolean |
true if the feature is implemented in the specified version, false otherwise. |
DocumentFragment is a "lightweight" or "minimal" Document object. It is very common to want to be able to extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for this purpose. While it is true that a Document object could fulfill this role, a Document object can potentially be a heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight object. DocumentFragment is such an object.
Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another Node -- may take DocumentFragment objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the DocumentFragment being moved to the child list of this node.
The children of a DocumentFragment node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document. DocumentFragment nodes do not need to be well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top nodes). For example, a DocumentFragment might have only one child and that child node could be a Text node. Such a structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.
When a DocumentFragment is inserted into a Document (or indeed any other Node that may take children) the children of the DocumentFragment and not the DocumentFragment itself are inserted into the Node. This makes the DocumentFragment very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the DocumentFragment acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user can use the standard methods from the Node interface, such as insertBefore and appendChild.
The Document interface represents the entire HTML or XML document. Conceptually, it is the root of the document tree, and provides the primary access to the document's data.
Since elements, text nodes, comments, processing instructions, etc. cannot exist outside the context of a Document, the Document interface also contains the factory methods needed to create these objects. The Node objects created have a ownerDocument attribute which associates them with the Document within whose context they were created.
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified name contains an illegal character. |
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A new Attr object with the following attributes:
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name contains an illegal character. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is malformed, if the qualifiedName has a prefix and the namespaceURI is null, if the qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", or if the qualifiedName is "xmlns" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/". |
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The new CDATASection object. |
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NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised if this document is an HTML document. |
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A new DocumentFragment. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified name contains an illegal character. |
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A new Element object with the following attributes:
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name contains an illegal character. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is malformed, if the qualifiedName has a prefix and the namespaceURI is null, or if the qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" [Namespaces]. |
Note: If any descendant of the Entity node has an unbound namespace prefix, the corresponding descendant of the created EntityReference node is also unbound; (its namespaceURI is null). The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve namespace prefixes.
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The new EntityReference object. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified name contains an illegal character. NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised if this document is an HTML document. |
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The new ProcessingInstruction object. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified target contains an illegal character. NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised if this document is an HTML document. |
Note: The DOM implementation must have information that says which attributes are of type ID. Attributes with the name "ID" are not of type ID unless so defined. Implementations that do not know whether attributes are of type ID or not are expected to return null.
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The matching element. |
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The imported node that belongs to this Document. |
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NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: Raised if the type of node being imported is not supported. |
The Node interface is the primary datatype for the entire Document Object Model. It represents a single node in the document tree. While all objects implementing the Node interface expose methods for dealing with children, not all objects implementing the Node interface may have children. For example, Text nodes may not have children, and adding children to such nodes results in a DOMException being raised.
The attributes nodeName, nodeValue and attributes are included as a mechanism to get at node information without casting down to the specific derived interface. In cases where there is no obvious mapping of these attributes for a specific nodeType (e.g., nodeValue for an Element or attributes for a Comment), this returns null. Note that the specialized interfaces may contain additional and more convenient mechanisms to get and set the relevant information.
An integer indicating which type of node this is.
Note: Numeric codes up to 200 are reserved to W3C for possible future use.
Defined Constants ATTRIBUTE_NODE The node is an Attr. CDATA_SECTION_NODE The node is a CDATASection. COMMENT_NODE The node is a Comment. DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE The node is a DocumentFragment. DOCUMENT_NODE The node is a Document. DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE The node is a DocumentType. ELEMENT_NODE The node is an Element. ENTITY_NODE The node is an Entity. ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE The node is an EntityReference. NOTATION_NODE The node is a Notation. PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE The node is a ProcessingInstruction. TEXT_NODE The node is a Text node.The values of nodeName, nodeValue, and attributes vary according to the node type as follows:
| Attr | name of attribute | value of attribute | null |
| CDATASection | #cdata-section | content of the CDATA Section | null |
| Comment | #comment | content of the comment | null |
| Document | #document | null | null |
| DocumentFragment | #document-fragment | null | null |
| DocumentType | document type name | null | null |
| Element | tag name | null | NamedNodeMap |
| Entity | entity name | null | null |
| EntityReference | name of entity referenced | null | null |
| Notation | notation name | null | null |
| ProcessingInstruction | target | entire content excluding the target | null |
| Text | #text | content of the text node | null |
Note: Per the Namespaces in XML Specification [Namespaces] an attribute does not inherit its namespace from the element it is attached to. If an attribute is not explicitly given a namespace, it simply has no namespace.
nextSibling of type Node, readonly The node immediately following this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.|
NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised when the node is readonly. |
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DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR: Raised when it would return more characters than fit in a DOMString variable on the implementation platform. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified prefix contains an illegal character. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the specified prefix is malformed, if the namespaceURI of this node is null, if the specified prefix is "xml" and the namespaceURI of this node is different from "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", if this node is an attribute and the specified prefix is "xmlns" and the namespaceURI of this node is different from "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/", or if this node is an attribute and the qualifiedName of this node is "xmlns" [Namespaces]. |
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The node added. |
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HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if this node is of a type that does not allow children of the type of the newChild node, or if the node to append is one of this node's ancestors. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newChild was created from a different document than the one that created this node. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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The duplicate node. |
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boolean |
true if this node has any attributes, false otherwise. |
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boolean |
true if this node has any children, false otherwise. |
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The node being inserted. |
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HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if this node is of a type that does not allow children of the type of the newChild node, or if the node to insert is one of this node's ancestors. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newChild was created from a different document than the one that created this node. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly or if the parent of the node being inserted is readonly. NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if refChild is not a child of this node. |
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boolean |
Returns true if the specified feature is supported on this node, false otherwise. |
Note: In cases where the document contains CDATASections, the normalize operation alone may not be sufficient, since XPointers do not differentiate between Text nodes and CDATASection nodes.
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The node removed. |
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if oldChild is not a child of this node. |
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The node replaced. |
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HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: Raised if this node is of a type that does not allow children of the type of the newChild node, or if the node to put in is one of this node's ancestors. WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newChild was created from a different document than the one that created this node. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node or the parent of the new node is readonly. NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if oldChild is not a child of this node. |
The NodeList interface provides the abstraction of an ordered collection of nodes, without defining or constraining how this collection is implemented. NodeList objects in the DOM are live.
The items in the NodeList are accessible via an integral index, starting from 0.
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The node at the indexth position in the NodeList, or null if that is not a valid index. |
Objects implementing the NamedNodeMap interface are used to represent collections of nodes that can be accessed by name. Note that NamedNodeMap does not inherit from NodeList; NamedNodeMaps are not maintained in any particular order. Objects contained in an object implementing NamedNodeMap may also be accessed by an ordinal index, but this is simply to allow convenient enumeration of the contents of a NamedNodeMap, and does not imply that the DOM specifies an order to these Nodes.
NamedNodeMap objects in the DOM are live.
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The node at the indexth position in the map, or null if that is not a valid index. |
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The node removed from this map if a node with such a name exists. |
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NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if there is no node named name in this map. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly. |
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The node removed from this map if a node with such a local name and namespace URI exists. |
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NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if there is no node with the specified namespaceURI and localName in this map. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly. |
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WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if arg was created from a different document than the one that created this map. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly. INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if arg is an Attr that is already an attribute of another Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements. |
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WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if arg was created from a different document than the one that created this map. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this map is readonly. INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if arg is an Attr that is already an attribute of another Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements. |
The CharacterData interface extends Node with a set of attributes and methods for accessing character data in the DOM. For clarity this set is defined here rather than on each object that uses these attributes and methods. No DOM objects correspond directly to CharacterData, though Text and others do inherit the interface from it. All offsets in this interface start from 0.
As explained in the DOMString interface, text strings in the DOM are represented in UTF-16, i.e. as a sequence of 16-bit units. In the following, the term 16-bit units is used whenever necessary to indicate that indexing on CharacterData is done in 16-bit units.
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised when the node is readonly. |
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DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR: Raised when it would return more characters than fit in a DOMString variable on the implementation platform. |
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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INDEX_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified offset is negative or greater than the number of 16-bit units in data, or if the specified count is negative. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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INDEX_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified offset is negative or greater than the number of 16-bit units in data. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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INDEX_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified offset is negative or greater than the number of 16-bit units in data, or if the specified count is negative. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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The specified substring. If the sum of offset and count exceeds the length, then all 16-bit units to the end of the data are returned. |
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INDEX_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified offset is negative or greater than the number of 16-bit units in data, or if the specified count is negative. DOMSTRING_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified range of text does not fit into a DOMString. |
The Attr interface represents an attribute in an Element object. Typically the allowable values for the attribute are defined in a document type definition.
Attr objects inherit the Node interface, but since they are not actually child nodes of the element they describe, the DOM does not consider them part of the document tree. Thus, the Node attributes parentNode, previousSibling, and nextSibling have a null value for Attr objects. The DOM takes the view that attributes are properties of elements rather than having a separate identity from the elements they are associated with; this should make it more efficient to implement such features as default attributes associated with all elements of a given type. Furthermore, Attr nodes may not be immediate children of a DocumentFragment. However, they can be associated with Element nodes contained within a DocumentFragment. In short, users and implementors of the DOM need to be aware that Attr nodes have some things in common with other objects inheriting the Node interface, but they also are quite distinct.
The attribute's effective value is determined as follows: if this attribute has been explicitly assigned any value, that value is the attribute's effective value; otherwise, if there is a declaration for this attribute, and that declaration includes a default value, then that default value is the attribute's effective value; otherwise, the attribute does not exist on this element in the structure model until it has been explicitly added. Note that the nodeValue attribute on the Attr instance can also be used to retrieve the string version of the attribute's value(s).
In XML, where the value of an attribute can contain entity references, the child nodes of the Attr node may be either Text or EntityReference nodes (when these are in use; see the description of EntityReference for discussion). Because the DOM Core is not aware of attribute types, it treats all attribute values as simple strings, even if the DTD or schema declares them as having tokenized types.
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised when the node is readonly. |
The Element interface represents an element in an HTML or XML document. Elements may have attributes associated with them; since the Element interface inherits from Node, the generic Node interface attribute attributes may be used to retrieve the set of all attributes for an element. There are methods on the Element interface to retrieve either an Attr object by name or an attribute value by name. In XML, where an attribute value may contain entity references, an Attr object should be retrieved to examine the possibly fairly complex sub-tree representing the attribute value. On the other hand, in HTML, where all attributes have simple string values, methods to directly access an attribute value can safely be used as a convenience.
Note: In DOM Level 2, the method normalize is inherited from the Node interface where it was moved.
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A list of matching Element nodes. |
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boolean |
true if an attribute with the given name is specified on this element or has a default value, false otherwise. |
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boolean |
true if an attribute with the given local name and namespace URI is specified or has a default value on this element, false otherwise. |
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. NOT_FOUND_ERR: Raised if oldAttr is not an attribute of the element. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified name contains an illegal character. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
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INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: Raised if the specified qualified name contains an illegal character. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. NAMESPACE_ERR: Raised if the qualifiedName is malformed, if the qualifiedName has a prefix and the namespaceURI is null, if the qualifiedName has a prefix that is "xml" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", or if the qualifiedName is "xmlns" and the namespaceURI is different from "http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/". |
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WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newAttr was created from a different document than the one that created the element. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if newAttr is already an attribute of another Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements. |
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If the newAttr attribute replaces an existing attribute with the same local name and namespace URI, the replaced Attr node is returned, otherwise null is returned. |
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WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: Raised if newAttr was created from a different document than the one that created the element. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. INUSE_ATTRIBUTE_ERR: Raised if newAttr is already an attribute of another Element object. The DOM user must explicitly clone Attr nodes to re-use them in other elements. |
The Text interface inherits from CharacterData and represents the textual content (termed character data in XML) of an Element or Attr. If there is no markup inside an element's content, the text is contained in a single object implementing the Text interface that is the only child of the element. If there is markup, it is parsed into the information items (elements, comments, etc.) and Text nodes that form the list of children of the element.
When a document is first made available via the DOM, there is only one Text node for each block of text. Users may create adjacent Text nodes that represent the contents of a given element without any intervening markup, but should be aware that there is no way to represent the separations between these nodes in XML or HTML, so they will not (in general) persist between DOM editing sessions. The normalize() method on Node merges any such adjacent Text objects into a single node for each block of text.
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The new node, of the same type as this node. |
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INDEX_SIZE_ERR: Raised if the specified offset is negative or greater than the number of 16-bit units in data. NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised if this node is readonly. |
This interface inherits from CharacterData and represents the content of a comment, i.e., all the characters between the starting '<!--' and ending '-->'. Note that this is the definition of a comment in XML, and, in practice, HTML, although some HTML tools may implement the full SGML comment structure.
The interfaces defined here form part of the DOM Core specification, but objects that expose these interfaces will never be encountered in a DOM implementation that deals only with HTML. As such, HTML-only DOM implementations [DOM Level 2 HTML] do not need to have objects that implement these interfaces.
The interfaces found within this section are not mandatory. A DOM application may use the hasFeature(feature, version) method of the DOMImplementation interface with parameter values "XML" and "2.0" (respectively) to determine whether or not this module is supported by the implementation. In order to fully support this module, an implementation must also support the "Core" feature defined in Fundamental Interfaces. Please refer to additional information about Conformance in this specification.
Interface CDATASectionCDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all the delimiters.
The DOMString attribute of the Text node holds the text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part of a CDATA section.
The CDATASection interface inherits from the CharacterData interface through the Text interface. Adjacent CDATASection nodes are not merged by use of the normalize method of the Node interface.
Note: Because no markup is recognized within a
CDATASection, character numeric references cannot be
used as an escape mechanism when serializing. Therefore, action
needs to be taken when serializing a CDATASection with
a character encoding where some of the contained characters cannot
be represented. Failure to do so would not produce well-formed
XML.
One potential solution in the serialization process is to end the
CDATA section before the character, output the character using a
character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA
section for any further characters in the text node. Note, however,
that some code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not
return an error or exception when a character is missing from the
encoding, making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on
serialization more difficult.
Each Document has a doctype attribute whose value is either null or a DocumentType object. The DocumentType interface in the DOM Core provides an interface to the list of entities that are defined for the document, and little else because the effect of namespaces and the various XML schema efforts on DTD representation are not clearly understood as of this writing.
The DOM Level 2 doesn't support editing DocumentType nodes.
Note: The actual content returned depends on how much information is available to the implementation. This may vary depending on various parameters, including the XML processor used to build the document.
name of type DOMString, readonly The name of DTD; i.e., the name immediately following the DOCTYPE keyword.This interface represents a notation declared in the DTD. A notation either declares, by name, the format of an unparsed entity (see section 4.7 of the XML 1.0 specification [XML]), or is used for formal declaration of processing instruction targets (see section 2.6 of the XML 1.0 specification [XML]). The nodeName attribute inherited from Node is set to the declared name of the notation.
The DOM Level 1 does not support editing Notation nodes; they are therefore readonly.
A Notation node does not have any parent.
This interface represents an entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity declaration. Entity declaration modeling has been left for a later Level of the DOM specification.
The nodeName attribute that is inherited from Node contains the name of the entity.
An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no EntityReference nodes in the document tree.
XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in external parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in the external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications, and that the replacement value of the entity may not be available. When the replacement value is available, the corresponding Entity node's child list represents the structure of that replacement text. Otherwise, the child list is empty.
The DOM Level 2 does not support editing Entity nodes; if a user wants to make changes to the contents of an Entity, every related EntityReference node has to be replaced in the structure model by a clone of the Entity's contents, and then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead. Entity nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
An Entity node does not have any parent.
Note: If the entity contains an unbound namespace prefix, the namespaceURI of the corresponding node in the Entity node subtree is null. The same is true for EntityReference nodes that refer to this entity, when they are created using the createEntityReference method of the Document interface. The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve namespace prefixes.
EntityReference objects may be inserted into the structure model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the user wishes to insert an entity reference. Note that character references and references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may completely expand references to entities while building the structure model, instead of providing EntityReference objects. If it does provide such objects, then for a given EntityReference node, it may be that there is no Entity node representing the referenced entity. If such an Entity exists, then the subtree of the EntityReference node is in general a copy of the Entity node subtree. However, this may not be true when an entity contains an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the descendants of the EntityReference node may be bound to different namespace URIs.
As for Entity nodes, EntityReference nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
The ProcessingInstruction interface represents a "processing instruction", used in XML as a way to keep processor-specific information in the text of the document.
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NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: Raised when the node is readonly. |