Date: Mar. 12, 2001
Link: http://xml.oreilly.com/news/xmlnut_0201.html
Source Author or Organization: W. Scott Means, O'Reilly & Associates

In this article W. Scott Means, co-author of the book XML in a Nutshell from O'Reilly & Associates, takes a look at the enhancements Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM Level 2, or DOM2) offers over Document Object Model Level 1 (DOM Level 1, or DOM1).

The Document Object Model provides parsing applications access to the information of an XML document, which is expressed as a hierarchical "tree". Parent, child, and sibling links of a node interface allow the tree structure to be navigated, so useful work can be accomplished with the information.

DOM Level 2 introduces support for Namespaces in XML. This allows any element type or attribute name to be uniquely identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that is a two-part "name" comprised of its local name and its XML namespace. This combats duplication and naming conflicts, and allows multiple XML vocabularies to be used in the same document. The author explains the mechanism, and new namespace-aware methods. New functionality for working with multiple documents is also explored.