“OVERVIEW OF THE DOCUMENT OBJECT MODEL (DOM), A.K.A. DHTML UNDER WINDOWS”

With the ubiquitity of the World Wide Web (WWW), its document format "Hypertext Markup Language " (HTML) and its planned successor „xhtml “ definded with the "Extensible Markup Language " (XML) have become so important that interacting with applications processing such text became a necessity. In the past years the World Wide Web consortium has created a set of application programming interfaces which allow programmers to manipulate the structure and content of HTML and/or XML files. In the case of WWW browsers, this allows for creating programmatically dynamic interfaces which can get changed on the fly while the user sits in front of the browser displaying those files and/or interfacing with the browser via the keyboard and mouse: the "Document Object Model " (DOM), dubbed "dynamic HTML " (DHTML) by Microsoft. This paper gives a conceptual overview of the architectural principles of HTML/XML and the role of "Cascading Style Sheets " (CSS) in this context. Building on this foundation, the DOM is introduced and Object Rexx examples under Microsoft's Internet Explorer (a Windows Scripting Host application) are demonstrated to stress some of the most important features of DOM, like generating text on the fly or creating programs which react upon user events like mouse clicks