Chapter 12. Objects and the DOM

Node manipulation is the W3C-recommended way for standards-compliant browsers to support Web pages that act more like applications than the standard, static pages that you're used to. For instance, you can have pages that change based on entries the user makes, without hitting the server, and you can update pages under script control. Although you can use techniques like innerHTML, as we've done elsewhere in this book, here we show the officially supported approach. While this can also be done with server-side CGIs, it's only with JavaScript that we can provide this functionality without the user having to go from page to page to page.

In this chapter, you'll learn a bit more about nodes and the DOM; add, delete, and work with specific nodes; and insert and replace nodes on your pages.