DOM Nodes

When I started out on this analysis I was aware of the DOM and object models and programming techniques. I even had some time as a Gupta SQLWindows analyst, which is pretty much all Ojects and Messaging. Object structure and inheritance was key to SQLWindows, along with the database stuff.

Now that I am "into" the DOM at a greater depth there are some terms that are coming to light. The use of the notion of a "node" is one of them.

Like so many other cases documentation can only go so far, the MDN documentation seems to he better than W3C in this regard. Both have far too much information to take in all at once.

MDN on the DOM

The Mozilla Developers Network do a pretty good job of explaining the DOM and describes "nodes" better, I think, than W3C - who drop you in the deep end.

The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree. With them, you can change the document's structure, style, or content.

MDN gave me the idea of attaching events to quoted text, as seen above. The MDN page is linked to the text.

Nodes can also have event handlers attached to them. Once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.

Element, text and comment nodes

The values of the Node Type are as follows:

• Node.ELEMENT_NODE (1) - p> or a div>
• Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE (2) - an attribute of an element
• Node.TEXT_NODE (3) - the actual text contained in an Element