Special Edition Using XSLT

Overview of the Document Object Model (DOM)

The Document Object Model (DOM) provides a means for accessing and manipulating XML documents at a programmatic level. The way it works is this: When the XML parser is called on to work with a document, it loads the document, reads it into memory, and generates a tree structure representing the individual elements, attributes, CDATA sections, and so on of the document. This is similar to the process of creating XSLT’s source tree, as described in Chapter 2, “XSL Jumpstart.”

Note

Implementations of the DOM vary from one implementation to another. For this reason, it is important to note that this chapter refers to the W3C’s DOM level 1 Recommendation. This specification can be found at the W3C’s Web ...