Chapter 5. Manipulating the DOM

The web experience is a partnership between web servers and web browsers. Traditionally, it has been the domain of the server to produce an HTML document ready for consumption by the browser. The techniques we have seen have shifted this arrangement slightly, by using CSS techniques to alter the appearance of that HTML on the fly. To really flex our JavaScript muscles, though, we'll need to learn to alter the document itself.

With jQuery, we can easily modify the document by using the interface provided by the Document Object Model (DOM). This will allow us to create elements and text in a web page, whenever we need to. We can also make any of these things vanish, or indeed transform them on the fly by adding, removing, or modifying their attributes.