CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch6 6g az

Introduction

"Content is something that remains constant , however the way we represent it keeps changing"

Web pages are more interactive and dynamic than ever. Web pages are nothing but documents which are usually based on HTML or XML formats. Web designers are adding visual affects , features like drag and drop and more ever a lot web applications business logic is residing in a web page. This is all possible because of the ability to change the structure, presentation of the web page dynamically by programming or scripting languages. There are a variety of programming languages which are changing the structure, style , presentation of web pages but how is this happening and what is it that is making this interoperability between the document and the numerous programming languages ?

In this article , we will start with a bit of history , of how browser wars lead to the formation of Document Object Model. What exactly is document object model ? , its W3C specifications and also we will try understand capabilities of DOM with JavaScript as a scripting language.

History

In Early 1990's , Netscape came up with a browser Netscape Navigator. It slowly and steadily captured the browser market. It was by far the most popular browser. Microsoft meanwhile realized the importance of this market space. Microsoft then came up with Internet Explorer 1.0. In 1995 they shipped it free with its operating system Windows 95. Netscape was thinking ahead and it came up new features like marquee and also a browser scripting language called LiveScript. There were some marketing concerns with name "LiveScript" which they renamed it to JavaScript. Although Netscape was coming with new features it was loosing on its robustness and stability. Microsoft very soon came up with an answer to JavaScript called JScript and also introduced CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets) in Internet Explorer 3.0. The fight for the market space continued and slowly Netscape started loosing its market share to Internet Explorer.

The browser scripting languages JavaScript and JScript both allowed dynamic changes of the elements in web pages. However it was very limited to fewer elements like forms , links etc. This was more of Dynamic HTML which is combination of scripts , static web pages and CSS. The way in which the elements where accessed by both JavaScript and JScript had some common grounds , this was called as DOM 0 (Document Object Model) . However slowly both continued to have specific versions and it slowly became rather difficult to have web pages designed for these two separate browsers. This lead to standardization and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) came up with a browser neutral way of accessing , modifying any elements of a document in general but more specific to XML or HTML documents. This introduced DOM 1 ( Document Object Model) and slowly Internet explorer and Netscape started supporting DOM 1. The first browser war almost ended with Internet Explorer capturing the whole of the browser market space. Netscape clearly lost but they gave their code to Open source Mozilla Foundation , which now we know as Mozilla FireFox.

What is DOM ?

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an application programming interface (API) for HTML and XML documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated. In the DOM specification, the term "document" is used in the broad sense - increasingly, XML is being used as a way of representing many different kinds of information that may be stored in diverse systems, and much of this would traditionally be seen as data rather than as documents. Nevertheless, XML presents this data as documents, and the DOM may be used to manage this data.

With the Document Object Model, programmers can build documents, navigate their structure, and add, modify, or delete elements and content. Anything found in an HTML or XML document can be accessed, changed, deleted, or added using the Document Object Model, with a few exceptions - in particular, the DOM interfaces for the XML internal and external subsets have not yet been specified.

As a W3C specification, one important objective for the Document Object Model is to provide a standard programming interface that can be used in a wide variety of environments and applications. The DOM is designed to be used with any programming language. In order to provide a precise, language-independent specification of the DOM interfaces, we have chosen to define the specifications in OMG IDL, as defined in the CORBA 2.2 specification. In addition to the OMG IDL specification, we provide language bindings for Java and ECMAScript (an industry-standard scripting language based on JavaScript and JScript). Note: OMG IDL is used only as a language-independent and implementation-neutral way to specify interfaces. Various other IDLs could have been used. In general, IDLs are designed for specific computing environments. The Document Object Model can be implemented in any computing environment, and does not require the object binding runtimes generally associated with such IDLs.

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_DOM_and_JavaScript#The_Document_Object_Model.2c_a_language-neutral_set_of_interfaces
• http://www.w3.org/2002/07/26-dom-article.html