Glossary
- Editors:
- Arnaud Le Hors, W3C
- Robert S. Sutor, IBM Research (for DOM Level 1)
Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or
modified from similar definitions in other W3C or standards
documents. See the links within the definitions for more
information.
- API
- An API is an Application Programming Interface, a set of
functions or methods used to access some functionality.
- document element
- There is only one document element in a
Document.
This element node is a child of the Document node. See
Well-Formed
XML Documents in XML [XML 1.0].
- document
order
- There is an ordering, document order, defined on all the
nodes in the document corresponding to the order in which the first
character of the XML representation of each node occurs in the XML
representation of the document after expansion of general entities.
Thus, the document
element node will be the first node. Element nodes occur
before their children. Thus, document order orders element nodes in
order of the occurrence of their start-tag in the XML (after
expansion of entities). The attribute nodes of an element occur
after the element and before its children. The relative order of
attribute nodes is implementation-dependent.
- element
- Each document contains one or more elements, the boundaries of
which are either delimited by start-tags and end-tags, or, for
empty elements by an empty-element tag. Each element has a type,
identified by name, and may have a set of attributes. Each
attribute has a name and a value. See
Logical Structures in XML [XML 1.0].
- logically-adjacent text
nodes
- Logically-adjacent text nodes are
Text or
CDataSection nodes that may be visited sequentially in
document
order without entering, exiting, or passing over
Element, Comment, or
ProcessingInstruction nodes.
- live
- An object is live if any change to the underlying
document structure is reflected in the object.
- model
- A model is the actual data representation for the
information at hand. Examples are the structural model and the
style model representing the parse structure and the style
information associated with a document. The model might be a tree,
or a directed graph, or something else.
- namespace prefix
- A namespace prefix is a string that associates an
element or attribute name with a namespace URI in XML. See
namespace prefix in Namespaces in XML [XML
Namespaces].
- namespace
URI
- A namespace URI is a URI that identifies an XML
namespace. This is called the namespace name in Namespaces in XML
[XML Namespaces].
- read only
node
- A read only node is a node that is immutable. This means
its list of children, its content, and its attributes, when it is
an element, cannot be changed in any way. However, a read only node
can possibly be moved, when it is not itself contained in a read
only node.
- tokenized
- The description given to various information items (for
example, attribute values of various types, but not including the
StringType CDATA) after having been processed by the XML processor.
The process includes stripping leading and trailing white space,
and replacing multiple space characters by one. See the definition
of tokenized type.
- well-formed
document
- A document is well-formed if it is tag valid and
entities are limited to single elements (i.e., single
sub-trees).