2. Document Object Model (Core) Level 1

2.7 Typical operation

Normally, a DOM-compliant implementation will make the main Document instance available to the application through some implementation-specific mechanism. For example, a typical implementation would pass the application a reference to a DocumentContext object. From the DocumentContext, the application may retrieve the Document object, which is the root of the document object hierarchy.

Once the application has access to the root of the document object hierarchy, it can use the methods defined herein for accessing individual nodes, selection of specific node types such as all images, and so on.