html - What is DOM? (summary and importance)

Question

What is the Document Object Model (DOM)?

I am asking this question because I primarily worked in .NET and I only have limited experience, but I often hear more experienced developers talk about/mention it. I read tutorials online but I am unable to make sense of the whole picture. I know that it is an API!

More specific questions are:

1. Where is it currently used?
2. What field(s) of developers use it (ex-.NET developers)?
3. How relevant is it for all developers in general to understand?

Answer 1

In general terms a DOM is a model for a structured document.
It is a central concept in today's IT and no developer can opt out of DOM. Be it in .net, in HTML, in XML or other domains where it is used.
It applies to all documents (word documents, HTML pages, XML files, etc). In the developer sphere it applies mainly in the HTML and the XML domains with slightly different meanings.

HTML

In the HTML arena, the DOM was introduced to support the revolution called in the late 90ies "dynamic HTML". Before IE4 and Netscape 4.0, HTML documents where not changeable inside the browser (all you had in these remote times to sprite up a web page was "animated GIF" !!!! and HTML was version 3.2).
Therefore dynamically manipulating inside the browser the document sent by the server was a huge revolution and initiated the march towards the attractive web sites we see today.

Javascript had been introduced by Netscape (baptised javascript to surf on the new Java trend, but unrelated) and was supported by both Netscape HTTP servers and Netscape browsers, with Internet Explorer eagerly following the move inside the browser. However When javascript is used to manipulate the content of a document, you need an easy way to designate the part of the document you want to interact with. That's where the DOM comes in. Although HTML 4 is not "well formed", browsers build an internal representation of the page with the "body" element at its top and plenty of html tags below, in a hierarchical organisation (child nodes, parent nodes attributes etc). The DOM is the model underpinning the API that allows to navigate this hierarchy.

Since both Netscape and IE browsers were competing solutions, there was little chance the NS and the IE DOM would converge. The W3C stepped in to allow smaller browser vendors to enter the competition and endeavoured to standardised the DOM. Hence the W3C DOM. All it did was just to introduce another dialect and as everybody knows it took years and two serious competitors to force MS to comply with the standards.

Even though more moderns navigating techniques like JQuery have shorthand notations for the DOM, they internally rely on the DOM.

XML

HTML made obvious the disadvantages of showing leniency towards the "well-formedness" of documents and this ushered a new craze : XML. In the web arena, XML and XSLT were first supported by IE5 and adopted in many more domains than just displaying pages.
To parse XML, in the Java Word mainly, you would develop a SAX parser which is basically a plugin to a SAX engine in which you describe what the engine should do of all the XML events (tags...) it will encounter in the parsed document. Developing a SAX parser is not straightforward but is a low footprint solution.
However you have to develop a specific one for each new document type...
So it was not long before libraries started to appear to parse any document and build an in-memory map of its hierarchy. Because it also had the same concepts of root, parents and children (inherited from SGML through HTML), it was also termed a DOM and the name applies regardless of the library.

Other domains

The concept of DOM is not restricted to or even invented for HTML or XML. A DOM is a general concept applicable to any document, especially those (the vast majority of them do) showing a hierarchical structure in which you need to navigate. You can speak about the DOM of a MS-Word document and there are APIs to navigate these as well.