Document Object Model
DHTML is not a technology in and of itself; rather, it is the product of three related and complementary technologies: HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and script. To allow scripts and components to access features of HTML and CSS, the contents of the document were represented as objects in a programming model known as the Document Object Model (DOM).
The DOM API is the foundation of DHTML, providing a structured interface that allows you to access and manipulate virtually anything within the document. The HTML elements in the document are available as individual objects, meaning you can examine and modify an element and its attributes by reading and setting properties and by calling methods. The text between elements is also available through DOM properties and methods.
The DOM also provides access to user actions such as pressing a key and clicking the mouse. You can intercept and process these and other events by creating event handler functions and routines. The event handler receives control each time a given event occurs and can carry out any appropriate action, including using the DOM to change the document.
Read more about this topic: Dynamic HTML
Famous quotes containing the words document, object and/or model:
“What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contempory who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!”
—Ellen Terry (1848–1928)
“In the one instance, the dreamer ... loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions ... until ... he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“When Titian was mixing brown madder,
His model was posed up a ladder.
Said Titian, “That position
Calls for coition,”
So he lept up the ladder and had her.”
—Anonymous.