Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or
modified from similar definitions in other W3C or standards documents.
See the links within the definitions for more information.
A [client] application is any software that uses the
Document Object Model programming interfaces provided by the
hosting implementation to accomplish useful work. Some
examples of client applications are scripts within an HTML
or XML document.
A context specifies an access pattern (or
path): a set of interfaces which give you a way to interact
with a model. For example, imagine a model with different
colored arcs connecting data nodes. A context might be a
sheet of colored acetate that is placed over the model
allowing you a partial view of the total information in the
model.
A convenience method is an operation on an
object that could be accomplished by a program consisting of
more basic operations on the object. Convenience methods are
usually provided to make the API easier and simpler to use or to
allow specific programs to create more optimized implementations
for common operations. A similar definition holds for a
convenience property.
A model for a document that represents the document
after it has been manipulated in some way. For example, any
combination of any of the following transformations would
create a cooked model:
Expansion of internal text entities.
Expansion of external entities.
Model augmentation with style-specified generated
text.
Execution of style-specified
reordering.
Execution of scripts.
A browser might only be able to provide access to a
cooked model, while an editor might provide access to a
cooked or the initial structure model (also known as the
uncooked model) for a document.
CORBA is the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture from the OMG
.
This architecture is a collection of objects and libraries that allow
the creation of applications containing objects that make and receive
requests and responses in a distributed environment.
A data model
is a collection of descriptions of data structures and their contained
fields, together with the operations or functions that manipulate them.
When new releases of specifications are released, some older
features may be marked as being deprecated. This
means that new work should not use the features and that
although they are supported in the current release, they may
not be supported or available in future releases.
The programming language defined by the ECMA-262
standard. As stated in
the standard, the originating technology for ECMAScript was
JavaScript.
Note that in the
ECMAScript binding, the word "property" is used in
the same sense as the IDL term
"attribute."
Each document contains one or more elements, the
boundaries of which are either delimited by start-tags and
end-tags, or, for empty elements by an empty-element tag.
Each element has a type, identified by name, and may have a
set of attributes. Each attribute has a name and a value.
[XML
]
This is the idea that an event can affect one object and
a set of related objects. Any of the potentially affected
objects can block the event or substitute a different one
(upward event propagation). The event is broadcast from the
node at which it originates to every parent node.
Two nodes are equivalent if they have the
same node type and same node name. Also, if the nodes
contain data, that must be the same. Finally, if the nodes have
attributes then collection of attribute names must be the same
and the attributes corresponding by name must be equivalent as nodes.
Two nodes are deeply equivalent if they are
equivalent, the child node lists are equivalent
are equivalent as NodeList objects, and the pairs of equivalent
attributes must in fact be deeply equivalent. Two NodeList objects are equivalent if they
have the same length, and the nodes corresponding by index
are deeply equivalent. Two NamedNodeMap objects are equivalent if they are
have the same length, they have same collection of names,
and the nodes corresponding by name in the maps
are deeply equivalent. Two DocumentType nodes are equivalent if they are equivalent
as nodes, have the same names, and have equivalent entities and attributes
NamedNodeMap objects.
A [hosting] implementation is a software module that
provides an implementation of the DOM interfaces so that a
client application can use them. Some examples of hosting
implementations are browsers, editors and document
repositories.
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a
simple markup language used to create hypertext documents
that are portable from one platform to another. HTML
documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are
appropriate for representing information from a wide range
of applications. [HTML 3.2
]
[HTML4.0
]
An Interface Definition Language (IDL) is
used to define the interfaces for accessing and operating
upon objects. Examples of IDLs are the Object Management Group's IDL
, Microsoft's IDL
, and Sun's Java IDL
.
In object-oriented programming, the ability to create new
classes (or interfaces) that contain all the methods and properties
of another class (or interface), plus additional methods and properties.
If class (or interface) D inherits from class (or interface) B, then
D is said to be derived from B. B is said to be a base
class (or interface) for D.
Some programming languages allow for multiple inheritance, that is, inheritance
from more than one class or interface.
Also known as the raw structure model or
the uncooked model, this represents the
document before it has been modified by entity expansions,
generated text, style-specified reordering, or the execution
of scripts. In some implementations, this might correspond
to the "initial parse tree" for the document, if
it ever exists. Note that a given implementation might not
be able to provide access to the initial structure model for
a document, though an editor probably would.
An interface is a declaration of a set of
methods with no information given about their implementation.
In object systems that support interfaces and inheritance,
interfaces can usually inherit from one another.
A programming language binding for an IDL
specification is an implementation of the interfaces in the
specification for the given language. For example, a Java
language binding for the Document Object Model IDL
specification would implement the concrete Java classes that
provide the functionality exposed by the
interfaces.
A model is the actual data representation
for the information at hand. Examples are the structural
model and the style model representing the parse structure
and the style information associated with a document. The
model might be a tree, or a directed graph, or something
else.
An object model
is a collection of
descriptions of classes or interfaces,
together with their member data, member functions,
and class-static operations.
