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## Package org.w3c.dom

The Document Object Model (DOM™) is a Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium, defining programming interfaces for XML (and, optionally, HTML) documents.

See:
Description

Interface Summary
Attr | The `Attr` interface represents an attribute in an `Element` object.
CDATASection | CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that would otherwise be regarded as markup.
CharacterData | The `CharacterData` interface extends Node with a set of attributes and methods for accessing character data in the DOM.
Comment | This represents the content of a comment, i.e., all the characters between the starting '`<!--`' and ending '`-->`'.
Document | The `Document` interface represents the entire HTML or XML document.
DocumentFragment | `DocumentFragment` is a "lightweight" or "minimal" `Document` object.
DocumentType | Each `Document` has a `doctype` attribute whose value is either `null` or a `DocumentType` object.
DOMImplementation | The `DOMImplementation` interface provides a number of methods for performing operations that are independent of any particular instance of the document object model.
Element | By far the vast majority of objects (apart from text) that authors encounter when traversing a document are `Element` nodes.
Entity | This interface represents an entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML document.
EntityReference | `EntityReference` objects may be inserted into the structure model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the user wishes to insert an entity reference.
NamedNodeMap | Objects implementing the `NamedNodeMap` interface are used to represent collections of nodes that can be accessed by name.
Node | The `Node` interface is the primary datatype for the entire Document Object Model.
NodeList | The `NodeList` interface provides the abstraction of an ordered collection of nodes, without defining or constraining how this collection is implemented.
Notation | This interface represents a notation declared in the DTD.
ProcessingInstruction | The `ProcessingInstruction` interface represents a "processing instruction", used in XML as a way to keep processor-specific information in the text of the document.
Text | The `Text` interface represents the textual content (termed character data in XML) of an `Element` or `Attr`.

Exception Summary
DOMException | DOM operations only raise exceptions in "exceptional" circumstances, i.e., when an operation is impossible to perform (either for logical reasons, because data is lost, or because the implementation has become unstable).

## Package org.w3c.dom Description

The Document Object Model (DOM™) is a Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium, defining programming interfaces for XML (and, optionally, HTML) documents. It is a stable document derived from a series of working drafts produced over the last year as deliverables of the W3C DOM Activity.

- Legal Statements
- Production Notes

### Legal Statements

The Recommendation and this Java package are Copyright © World Wide Web Consortium (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/

DOM is a Trademark of the World Wide Web Consortium.

### Production Notes

The Java sources from which this package documentation was created were converted directly from the XML version of the DOM level 1 specification, as made available internal to the W3C from http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/xml-source.zip The conversion was done on October 1, 1998 shortly after those specifications were made generally available. Later a few files were reconverted to incorporate more information, and some references to the `DOMString` type were manually changed to values more appropriate to the Java mapping.

A conversion program used Sun's validating XML parser to load that specification into a customized DOM tree. That program then walked over that tree and, for each node in the core specification that corresponded to an interface or exception, generated the corresponding Java source file. That source file included javadoc directives generated from that specification, holding English descriptions of the interfaces, their attributes, and their methods. The source files were compiled, and the resulting class files were compared against those generated from the W3C versions of the Java source files in order to provide assurance that no errors were introduced by the conversion program.

A similar process was used to generate the DOM specification itself, and its Java bindings. However, the process currently used by W3C does not generate Javadoc comments corresponding as closely to the specification itself, or to the current (JDK 1.2) level of documentation standards.

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