The Document Object Model (DOM) API is provided within browsers to allow developers to read from and dynamically mutate web documents. Upon its initial introduction in 1997, it was very limited in scope but has expanded greatly in the last two decades, allowing us to now have programmatic access to a wide variety of browser functionality.
The DOM itself presents us with a hierarchy of elements that are derived from the parsed HTML of a given page. This hierarchy is made accessible to JavaScript via an API. This API allows us to select elements, traverse trees of elements, and inspect element properties and characteristics. Here is an example of a DOM tree with the corresponding JavaScript used to access it:
The way we access specific DOM nodes has changed over the years but its fundamental tree-like structure has remained the same. Via access...
