Talk:Document Object Model
Article Quality
I think the quality of this article is seriously lacking. There is very little information actually regarding the concept of the DOM, and not some tangent.
Also the firt subsection, "Levels", is completely without context: There is no explanation of what a DOM level even is.
I am going to put the cleanup boilerplate on the top of the page.
Title Letter Case
Should this article's title be lowercased to Document object model? Yes, I know it's a moot point once Wikipedia implements case-insensitivity, but until then... --Damian Yerrick
I don't think so, the W3.org on DOM page has Document Object Model. -- HJH
Some more things concerning the DOM can probably be mentioned in the article, for instance the fact that it is not only used in web-browsers but also for xml processing in other applications. A summary about the different levels of the DOM and what purpose they serve could also be helpful in my opinion. Also some links to implementations and libraries that are based on the DOM could be a good entry point for people reading this and being more interested in practical DOM. I never contributed to Wiki projects due to general lack of time, maybe I'll eventually get it going here. -- _tc
W3C Recommendations
Could anybody explain what is "W3C Recommendation"? Is there any difference between some Level 3 specification which is included in W3C Recommendation and which is not?
Answer
The entire W3C Process is described on the W3 site. Basically, working groups are created to make up working drafts, which pass through a series of revisions until they are finally released as recommendations. The recommendations are the 'standards'.
The various levels show major revisions - DOM 0 is essentially everything before W3C, DOM 1 was the first W3 standard, etc. DOM 2 is pretty well supported by nearly all browsers, DOM 3 is quite extensive and as yet its extensions to DOM 2 are not fully or widely supported (but it's getting there).
W3C DOM
The article so far discouraged the use of the DOM giving the reason that browser support is not sufficient (including some Microsoft bashing). However nowadays the situation is fairly stable and many methods of the W3CDOM may be used without problems in a cross-browser way. I have added thow that it is a good practice to test first for the availabilty certain DOM-API functions. Hirzel 09:31, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
More W3C DOM
The discussion on feature detection is somewhat misleading and seems to suggest something only marginally better than good 'ol browser sniffing. The idea of feature detection is to test every feature that either may not be supported or may be supported differently on various browsers. The classic is of course getElementById and document.all, but there are many, many others such as clientX/clientY and pageX/pageY etc.
The outcome of feature detection is that either the appropriate code is offered for the environment, or nothing at all. There should be no errors shown to the user - the user should not even be aware that something has not happened.
Feature detection becomes even more important as use of XHLHttpRequest and parsing of XML becomes more prevelant - there are many differences even between versions of the same browser.
comp.lang.javascript FAQ #4.26 OzFred 07:09, 25 October 2005 (UTC)