Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning jQuery
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

The Document Object Model


One of the most powerful aspects of jQuery is its ability to make DOM traversal easy. The Document Object Model is a family-tree structure of sorts. HTML, like other markup languages, uses this model to describe the relationships of things on a page. When we refer to these relationships, we use the same terminology that we use when referring to family relationships—parents, children, and so on. A simple example can help us understand how the family tree metaphor applies to a document:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>the title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div>
      <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is another paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is yet another paragraph.</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Here, <html> is the ancestor of all the other elements; in other words, all the other elements are descendants of <html>. The <head> and <body>...