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      Accessing the Document Object Model with JavaScript


      The Document Object Model (DOM) is a language-agnostic interface that provides access to an HTML document’s structure and content. JavaScript is often the language used to access the DOM in order to generate dynamic and interactive web pages.

      This guide provides an overview of the Document Object Model and shows you how to interact with it using a series of JavaScript examples.

      Before You Begin

      The examples in this guide use a web browser’s developer tools to view the DOM and interact with a JavaScript console. To get the most out of the information in this guide, follow along in your own Chrome or Firefox browser.

      • On Chrome, refer to Google’s
        Open Chrome DevTools
        documentation to learn how to access their developer tools.

      • On Firefox, refer to Mozilla’s
        Open the Inspector
        documentation to learn how to access their developer tools.

      What Is the Document Object Model?

      The Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface that provides access to an HTML document’s structure and content. The DOM represents the elements and content of an HTML document as nodes and objects. The DOM representation can then be accessed and modified by JavaScript and other scripting languages.

      Essentially, the DOM is what allows web pages to become dynamic. Languages like JavaScript work with the nodes that make up the DOM to dynamically and interactively change a web page’s presentation.

      There are many ways of displaying the DOM. One of the most widely used ways is the HTML format. When you open your browser’s Inspect dashboard, you can view the HTML representation of a web page. The example below shows the HTML markup for a simple web page.

      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html>
        <head>
          <title>Example Page</title>
        </head>
        <body>
          <p>Example page content.</p>
        </body>
      </html>
      

      How the DOM Differs from HTML Source Code

      The DOM itself is not equivalent to a web page’s HTML source code. Instead, the DOM is a representation of how a web page is displayed in the moment that it is accessed.

      To illustrate how the DOM and HTML source code can differ, the example below displays an HTML source file. The HTML file includes a JavaScript function that adds additional HTML elements to the page once the page loads.

      File: example-page.html
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      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html>
        <head>
          <title>Example Page</title>
          <script>
              function addExampleList() {
                  const exampleList = document.createElement("ul");
      
                  const exampleListItem1 = document.createElement("li");
                  const exampleListItem1Text = document.createTextNode("First item");
                  exampleListItem1.appendChild(exampleListItem1Text);
      
                  const exampleListItem2 = document.createElement("li");
                  const exampleListItem2Text = document.createTextNode("second item");
                  exampleListItem2.appendChild(exampleListItem2Text);
      
                  exampleList.appendChild(exampleListItem1);
                  exampleList.appendChild(exampleListItem2);
      
                  document.body.appendChild(exampleList);
              }
          </script>
        </head>
        <body onload="addExampleList();">
          <p>Example page content.</p>
        </body>
      </html>

      Once the HTML page is loaded and the JavaScript runs, the DOM representation of the HTML source above resembles the code displayed below. The JavaScript has been left out to make the resulting HTML easier to read. The HTML now includes an unordered list (<ul>...</ul>) with two list items (<li>...</li>).

      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html>
          <head>
              <title>Example Page</title>
              <script>[...]</script>
          </head>
          <body onload="addExampleList();">
              <p>Example page content.</p>
              <ul>
                  <li>First item</li>
                  <li>Second item</li>
              </ul>
          </body>
      </html>
      

      Since the DOM is concerned with displaying the current state of an HTML page, it now displays the new HTML elements that were added to the page by the JavaScript. The DOM always reflects any additions, subtractions, or other modifications that happen to a web page. This characteristic is what enables the DOM to make web pages dynamic.

      The Document Object Model and JavaScript

      Most often, JavaScript is how web developers interact with the DOM. JavaScript is able to access the DOM with the document object and the nodes nested under it.

      The next sections explain what the document object is and the parts that make it up.

      Document Object

      To work with the DOM, client-side JavaScript provides the document object. This object includes properties and methods to access and modify the DOM.

      The previous section included some examples of the document object in action. Below are two additional commands that show more of the document object’s features.

      1. The document object’s properties provide information about the HTML document or access to its nested nodes. They also allow you to modify characteristics of the DOM as shown in the example below:

        document.body.style.backgroundColor = "blue";
        

        The example JavaScript accesses the document object’s backgroundColor property and sets its value to "blue". The web page it modifies should now have a blue background. The DOM representation of the change looks as follows:

        <!DOCTYPE html>
        <html>
            <head>
                <title>Example Page</title>
                <script>[...]</script>
            </head>
            <body onload="addExampleList();" style="background-color: blue;">
                <p>Example page content.</p>
                <ul>
                    <li>First item</li>
                    <li>second item</li>
                </ul>
            </body>
        </html>
        

        The color blue is assigned to the <body> element using the style attribute.

      2. The document object has several methods that do everything from provide access to specific nodes to add new nodes to the DOM. In the example below, the getElementsByTagName() method grabs every HTML element with the tag name, <li>. The JavaScript loops through those elements, and then outputs each elements textContent attributes.

        for (item of document.getElementsByTagName("li")) {
            console.log(item.textContent);
        }
        

        Using the for loop above, the JavaScript console should display the following output:

        First item
        Second item

      Nodes and Elements

      The document object contains numerous other objects that all make up the DOM. These objects are called nodes. Nodes include everything from HTML elements, to attributes, to text.

      You are likely to work most frequently with element nodes. DOM element nodes correspond to a web page’s HTML elements. They allow you to access and manipulate the building blocks of a web page.

      The script used in the
      How the DOM Differs from HTML Source
      section added a <ul> element and <li> elements to the page. This added the following two kinds of nodes to the page:

      • Element nodes, which were created using the document.createElement method.
      • Text nodes, created with the document.createTextNode method.

      Each part of the document object is actually a node of some kind or other. Additionally, each node inherits common properties, like the appendChild method, which lets elements add text nodes.

      The document object does more than just let you extend the DOM. For instance, you can also use it to navigate the DOM and make precise modifications to it. The script below demonstrates how these modifications can be made to the DOM. Access the
      example-page.html
      page in your browser. Then, open your browser’s JavaScript console, and enter in the following JavaScript:

      const listItems = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
      
      for (item of listItems) {
          const newTextNode = document.createTextNode(item.textContent.replace("item", "thing"));
      
          item.innerHTML = "";
          item.appendChild(newTextNode);
      }
      

      As a result, the DOM is updated and the text, item, contained within the <li> tags is updated to thing.

      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html>
          <head>
              <title>Example Page</title>
              <script>[...]</script>
            </head>
            <body onload="addExampleList();">
              <p>Example page content.</p>
              <ul>
                  <li>First thing</li>
                  <li>Second thing</li>
              </ul>
          </body>
      </html>
      

      See our guide
      Traversing the Document Object Model with JavaScript
      , to learn about other built-in document object methods.

      Conclusion

      The DOM provides an interface to an HTML web page. This enables you to manipulate the structure and content of a web page using scripting languages, like JavaScript. This guide introduced you to the DOM and demonstrated how JavaScript is used to add, modify, and remove HTML elements from a web page.

      More Information

      You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information
      on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be
      useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of
      externally hosted materials.



      Source link

      Traversing the Document Object Model with JavaScript


      The Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface that gives scripting languages, like JavaScript, access to a web page’s structure and content. You can learn more about the DOM and how it represents HTML in our guide
      Introduction to the DOM
      .

      The DOM is organized as a tree of objects, called nodes, that give access to everything from HTML elements to the text displayed on a web page. Understanding how to navigate and access nodes on this tree is essential to working with the DOM. This guide explains the DOM tree, how to navigate it, and how to access its nodes using JavaScript.

      Before You Begin

      The examples in this guide use a web browser’s developer tools to view the DOM and interact with a JavaScript console. To get the most out of the information in this guide, follow along in your own Chrome or Firefox browser.

      • On Chrome, refer to Google’s
        Open Chrome DevTools
        documentation to learn how to access their developer tools.
      • On Firefox, refer to Mozilla’s
        Open the Inspector
        documentation to learn how to access their developer tools.

      Most of this guide’s examples are based on an example web page created from the HTML source code displayed below. To follow along with this guide’s example,
      view the rendered example web page
      in your browser.

      File: example-page.html
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      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html>
          <head>
              <title>Example Page</title>
          </head>
          <body>
              <div id="first-div" class="content-div">
                  <p>Example page content.</p>
                  <ul>
                      <li><span class="numeral-name" style="color: green;">First</span> item</li>
                      <li><span class="numeral-name" style="color: red;">Second</span> item</li>
                  </ul>
              </div>
              <div id="second-div" class="content-div">
                  <p><a href="https://loremipsum.io/">Lorem ipsum</a> dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Tortor condimentum lacinia quis vel eros donec. Purus ut faucibus pulvinar elementum integer enim neque volutpat ac. Netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas sed tempus. Nulla posuere sollicitudin aliquam ultrices sagittis orci a scelerisque. Et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas sed. Purus ut faucibus pulvinar elementum integer enim neque. <em>Amet consectetur adipiscing elit ut aliquam.</em></p>
              </div>
          </body>
      </html>

      Understanding the DOM Tree

      The DOM is organized as a tree, each branch of which is a node. Though many nodes represent HTML elements, they also represent attributes and text associated with elements.

      In the following sections, you learn more about the structure of the DOM tree. You also learn about the components used to identify nodes and sets of nodes, which is the basis for effectively accessing nodes.

      What Is the DOM Tree?

      The
      document object
      is the base of all of the DOM’s nodes. The nodes are arranged as a tree, with nodes nested under other nodes. Below, is an example of the DOM representation of a simple web page:

      <body>
          <div>
              <p style="color: purple;">Paragraph text</p>
          </div>
          <div>
              <ul>
                  <li>First item</li>
                  <li>Second item</li>
              </ul>
          </div>
      </body>
      

      In the example above, elements nest under other elements. The two div elements are nested under the body element. Text nodes are nested under the p and li elements, and the style attribute is considered a node under the p element, as well.

      Plotting the nesting structure out, the DOM resembles the following tree:

      body
       \_ div
       |   \_ p
       |      \_ [text]
       |      |
       |      \_ [attribute]
       \_ div
           \_ ul
               \_ li
               |   \_ [text]
               |
               \_ li
                   \_ [text]
      

      Knowing the arrangement of the DOM tree and its leaves, helps you understand how to access specific nodes when working with JavaScript. This is especially true when you are working with more complicated web pages. The
      Navigating the DOM Tree
      section of this guide includes a more in-depth discussion on moving around the nodes of the DOM tree.

      The diagram below provides a visualization of the DOM tree for this guide’s
      example web page
      . You can also view the example-page.html file in the
      Before You Begin
      section of this guide.

      A DOM tree for an example web page

      How Are Nodes Accessed?

      When working with JavaScript, you need to pinpoint a node or a particular set of nodes to access. Nodes can be identified by the three components listed below:

      • Tags, used to define HTML elements. Common examples include div for page components, p for paragraphs, and a for hyperlinks.
      • Classes that distinguish between similar elements. Classes are optional, but let you apply CSS styles and let you differentiate between a subset of the same type of element.
      • IDs, which are meant to identify particular elements. These are most useful when applied to elements that you want to be able to conveniently and consistently select individually from the DOM.

      Although this is not always the case, the arrangement of these components above generally reflects the components’ specificity, from least specific to most. For instance:

      • A tag can be used to identify every div element on a page.
      • A class can identify a smaller set of those div elements.
      • An ID can identify a specific div element.

      The
      Navigating the DOM Tree
      section below shows how these components can be used to access particular elements or set of elements.

      Query Selectors

      The popular JavaScript library
      jQuery
      introduced query selectors. These give you advanced ways to access DOM elements, using the above three components as well as attributes and other node features. Query selectors even let you combine all of these in a single command.

      JavaScript now directly implements its own query selectors as well. This gives you access to advanced DOM selections, which are covered in depth later on in this guide.

      To give you an idea, the list below includes some examples of where you can use query selectors to fetch elements. The query selectors can be based on elements:

      • matching a specific sequence of tag, class, and/or ID
      • with a given attribute and/or attribute value
      • with a matching parent element
      • that do not match a query

      Once you understand the DOM’s tree structure and how its nodes are identified, you can start using JavaScript to access and alter the DOM. The sections below show how you can use JavaScript to select specific elements from the DOM. This is divided into two sections:

      1. Using standard methods on DOM objects. These have been around for a longer time and provide some of the most straightforward selection methods.
      2. Using query selectors. These are relatively new features in standard JavaScript and provide advanced selection methods. They are ideal when you want to make complicated queries in a few commands.

      How to Access Elements via Object Methods

      Most often, you can start accessing the DOM elements you need using methods from the document object. These allow you to match elements based on tag, class, or ID.

      Moreover, these methods are inherited by any element object. This makes it possible to navigate the DOM tree from element to element, narrowing it down to the specific elements you need.

      • To fetch elements based on tag, use the getElementsByTagName method:

         document.getElementsByTagName("p");
        
      • To fetch elements based on class, use the getElementsByClassName method:

         document.getElementsByClassName("content-div");
        
      • To fetch an element based on ID, use the getElementById method:

         document.getElementById("first-div");
        

      With the exception of getElementById, all the listed methods return an array of elements, no matter how many elements actually match the query. The getElementById method only returns the first matching element, even if multiple elements on the page have the same ID.

      The following example shows how you can traverse the DOM using a combination of the inherited document object methods. It also shows how you can leverage the fact that every element inherits these methods, allowing you to narrow your search down the DOM tree.

      // Fetch the element with the `first-div` ID. This uses the `document` object,
      // so the search looks at all elements on the page.
      const first_div_element = document.getElementById("first-div");
      
      // Fetch all of the `ul` elements from under the `first-div` element. Remember,
      // this method returns an array, even if there is only one matching element.
      const ul_elements = first_div_element.getElementsByTagName("ul");
      
      // Fetch the elements with the `numeral-name` class from under the first
      // element in the array of `ul` elements.
      const numeral_elements = ul_elements[0].getElementsByClassName("numeral-name");
      
      // Grab and print the `style.color` value from each of the matching
      // `numeral-name` elements.
      for (const span_element of numeral_elements) {
          console.log(span_element.style.color);
      }
      

      If you run the above JavaScript in your web browser’s developer tools console, you see the following output.

      green
      red

      From the example above, you could also get to the numeral-name elements directly using the following code:

      const numeral_elements = document.getElementsByClassName("numeral-name");
      

      The approach of using particular elements’ methods to select lower elements on the tree can be extraordinarily helpful in some cases. For instance, if you want to select only the p elements from the second div, use the following JavaScript code:

      const second_div_element = document.getElementById("second-div");
      const p_elements = second_div_element.getElementsByTagName("p");
      

      How to Access Elements via Query Selectors

      Query selectors give you more advanced options for selecting elements from the DOM. They can be accessed via two methods from the document object — and they are also inherited on all other element objects. The two methods are the following:

      • querySelector fetches one element matching the query string. If multiple elements match, the method only returns the first one.
      • querySelectorAll fetches an array of elements matching the query string. Even if only one element matches, the result is an array.

      Like the methods covered in the previous section, these query selector methods let you select elements based on tag, class, and ID. However, the query selector syntax also lets you combine element selectors, and expands on how you can search for specific elements.

      The following examples display some key ways in which you can use query selectors to navigate and access elements from the DOM.

      • You can look for elements with a specific combination of tag, class, and ID. For instance, to search for a combination of the div tag, the content-div class, and the first-div ID, use the following code:

          document.querySelectorAll("div.content-div#first-div");
        

        The query selector syntax uses . to precede class names and # to precede IDs. It assumes labels without a prefix to be tag names.

      • You can look for elements nested under particular elements. These are called the descendants of an element. The following example finds em elements nested somewhere under any element with the content-div class:

          document.querySelectorAll(".content-div em");
        
      • You can look for elements based on associated attributes. The example below accesses the first element with an href attribute:

          document.querySelector("[href]");
        

        Alongside this, you can also specify the tag, class, and/or ID. This allows you to narrow down the search to elements whose attribute has a specific value:

          document.querySelector("a[href="https://loremipsum.io/"]");
        
      • You can look for elements based on their direct parent elements. The next command fetches all p elements that are immediate children of any div elements with the first-div ID:

          document.querySelectorAll("div#first-div > p");
        

        This selector is more specific than the descendant selector above. Where the descendant selector div em grabs an element from the example page, the child selector div > em does not.

        Why is this? The page’s em element is a direct child of a p element — that is, nested immediately under a p element — but not a div element. It is only a descendant of a div element, meaning it is nested somewhere, however deeply, beneath one.

      • You can look for elements that do not have a certain matching quality. For instance, the example below gets all p elements that are not a child of an element with the first-div ID:

          document.querySelectorAll("p:not(#first-div > p)")
        

      The above is, in fact, just a selection of some of the most commonly used features of the query selector. You can get more examples of query selector options in the
      More Information
      section of this guide.

      Conclusion

      This tutorial walked you through what the DOM tree looks like, how to navigate its parts, and how to start accessing them. The
      links below
      give you some resources to learn more about navigating the DOM, with more examples and coverage of advanced options and scenarios.

      More Information

      You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information
      on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be
      useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of
      externally hosted materials.



      Source link

      Understanding the DOM — Document Object Model eBook


      Download the Complete eBook!

      Understanding the DOM — Document Object Model eBook in EPUB format

      Understanding the DOM — Document Object Model eBook in PDF format

      Introduction to the eBook

      JavaScript is the de facto programming language of the web, but the language itself does not include any built-in method for working with input/output (I/O), such as graphics display and sound. Instead, the web browser provides an API for accessing the HTML document in a tree structure known as the Document Object Model (DOM). The combination of JavaScript and the DOM is what allows us to create interactive, dynamic websites.

      Many modern frameworks, such as React, Vue, and Svelte abstract away much of the DOM from the developer, but frameworks also use the DOM under the hood. The JavaScript library jQuery was also created to make working with the DOM easier, but the modern development practice is to work with the DOM directly. In order to be a proficient web developer, having a deep understanding of what the DOM is and how to work with it is essential. The goal of this book is to provide a base understanding of the DOM, as well as explore examples of the most common and useful methods for interacting with the DOM.

      This book is based on the Understanding the DOM tutorial series found on the DigitalOcean Community. The topics that it covers include:

      • The DOM and DOM tree structure
      • How to access, traverse, and modify nodes and elements in the DOM
      • How to modify attributes, classes, and styles in the DOM
      • Use events to make interactive, dynamic websites

      Each chapter is self-contained and can be followed independently of the others. However, if you are not yet familiar with the concept of the DOM and DOM tree, it is recommended that you read the introductory chapters first.

      Download the eBook

      You can download the eBook in either the EPUB or PDF format by following the links below.

      Download the Complete eBook!

      Understanding the DOM — Document Object Model eBook in EPUB format

      Understanding the DOM — Document Object Model eBook in PDF format

      If you’d like to learn more about JavaScript, visit the DigitalOcean Community’s JavaScript section. You can follow along with the How to Code in JavaScript series for a directed learning experience.



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