DOM introduction

http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_intro.asp

The DOM is a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard.

The DOM defines a standard for accessing documents like XML and HTML:

"The W3C Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a document."

The DOM is separated into 3 different parts / levels:

• Core DOM - standard model for any structured document
• XML DOM - standard model for XML documents
• HTML DOM - standard model for HTML documents

The DOM defines the objects and properties of all document elements, and the methods (interface) to access them.

我的理解：DOM是将文档(HTML,XML等)内容解析成对象的标准。在browser中由layout engine实现HTML DOM，将HTML elements解析成脚本语言(例如javascript)可访问的对象，脚本可以对DOM对象进行修改从而产生动态网页效果(例如igoogle中操作各种gadgets)。