DOM and JavaScript

The short example above, like nearly all of the examples in this reference, is JavaScript. That is to say, it's written in JavaScript, but it uses the DOM to access the document and its elements.

The DOM is not a programming language, but without it, the JavaScript language wouldn't have any model or notion of web pages, HTML documents, XML documents, and their component parts (e.g. elements).

Every element in a document—the document as a whole, the head, tables within the document, table headers, text within the table cells—is part of the document object model for that document, so they can all be accessed and manipulated using the DOM and a scripting language like JavaScript.

In the beginning, JavaScript and the DOM were tightly intertwined, but eventually, they evolved into separate entities. The page content is stored in the DOM and may be accessed and manipulated via JavaScript, so that we may write this approximative equation:

API = DOM + JavaScript

API: a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or another service.

DOM