Glossary
- Editors
- Arnaud Le Hors, W3C
- Robert S. Sutor, IBM Research (for DOM Level 1)
Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or
modified from similar definitions in other W3C or standards documents.
See the links within the definitions for more information.
- 16-bit unit
- The base unit of a
DOMString. This indicates that
indexing on a DOMString occurs in units of 16 bits.
This must not be misunderstood to mean that a DOMString
can store arbitrary 16-bit units. A DOMString is a
character string encoded in UTF-16; this means that the restrictions
of UTF-16 as well as the other relevant restrictions on character strings
must be maintained. A single character, for example in the form of a
numeric character reference, may correspond to one or two 16-bit units. - ancestor
- An ancestor node of any node A is any node
above A in a tree model of a document, where "above" means
"toward the root."
- API
- An API is an application programming
interface, a set of functions or methods used to access some
functionality.
- child
- A child is an immediate descendant node of
a node.
- COM
- COM is Microsoft's Component Object Model [COM], a technology for building applications from binary
software components.
- convenience
- A convenience method is an operation on an
object that could be accomplished by a program consisting of
more basic operations on the object. Convenience methods are
usually provided to make the API easier and simpler to use or to
allow specific programs to create more optimized implementations
for common operations. A similar definition holds for a
convenience property.
- descendant
- A descendant node of any node A is any node
below A in a tree model of a document, where "below" means
"away from the root."
- ECMAScript
- The programming language defined by the ECMA-262 standard
[ECMAScript]. As stated in the standard, the
originating technology for ECMAScript was JavaScript [JavaScript]. Note that in the ECMAScript binding, the word
"property" is used in the same sense as the IDL term
"attribute."
- element
- Each document contains one or more elements, the
boundaries of which are either delimited by start-tags and
end-tags, or, for empty elements by an empty-element tag.
Each element has a type, identified by name, and may have a
set of attributes. Each attribute has a name and a value.
See
Logical
Structures in XML [XML].
- information item
- An information item is an abstract representation of some
component of an XML document. See the [Infoset]
for details.
- inheritance
- In object-oriented programming, the ability to create new
classes (or interfaces) that contain all the methods and properties
of another class (or interface), plus additional methods and
properties. If class (or interface) D inherits from class (or
interface) B, then D is said to be derived from B. B is
said to be a base class (or interface) for D. Some
programming languages allow for multiple inheritance, that is,
inheritance from more than one class or interface.
- local name
- A local name is the local part of a qualified
name.
This is called the local
part in Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- namespace prefix
- A namespace prefix is a string that associates
an element or attribute name with a namespace URI in
XML. See namespace
prefix in Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- namespace URI
- A namespace URI is a URI that identifies
an XML namespace. This is called the namespace name in
Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- parent
- A parent is an immediate ancestor node of a
node.
- qualified name
- A qualified name is the name of an element or
attribute defined as the concatenation of a local name
(as defined in this specification), optionally preceded by a
namespace prefix and colon character. See
Qualified Names in
Namespaces in XML [Namespaces].
- readonly node
- A readonly node is a node that is immutable. This
means its list of children, its content, and its attributes, when it
is an element, cannot be changed in any way. However, a readonly node
can possibly be moved, when it is not itself contained in a readonly
node.
- root node
- The root node is the unique node that is
not a child of any other node. All other nodes are children
or other descendants of the root node. See
Well-Formed XML
Documents in XML [XML].
- sibling
- Two nodes are siblings if they have the
same parent node.
- string comparison
- When string matching is required, it is to occur as
though the comparison was between 2 sequences of code points
from the Unicode 2.0 standard.
- token
- An information item such as an
XML Name which has been
tokenized.
- tokenized
- The description given to various information items (for example,
attribute values of various types, but not including the StringType
CDATA) after having been processed by the XML processor. The process
includes stripping leading and trailing white space, and replacing
multiple space characters by one. See the definition of
tokenized type.
- well-formed document
- A document is well-formed if it is tag
valid and entities are limited to single elements (i.e.,
single sub-trees).
- XML name
- See
XML name in
the XML specification ([XML]).
- XML namespace
- An XML namespace is a collection of names,
identified by a URI reference [RFC2396], which are used
in XML documents as element types and attribute names. [Namespaces]