Document (thing)

This object represents and contains an entire document. It provides the factory methods required to create all types of child Node (see the create* methods). Nodes created this way have their ownerDocument set to the document used to create them.

A document node may have the following child nodes:

• Element (only one)
• ProcessingInstruction
• Comment
• DocumentType (only one)

See DocumentType and DOMImplementation for details. Returns the DocumentType node of the document.

Returns the root Element of the document. For example, in a valid XHTML document, this will be the element with a tagName of "HTML" (see also getElementsByTagName* methods).

See DOMImplementation for details. Returns the DOMImplementation in use by the document.

Creates an Attr node with the nodeName attribute set to name and localName, prefix and namespaceURI set to null. The value is the empty string. The attribute can be applied to an element using that object's setAttributeNode method. See also createAttributeNS.

This method allows values to be set on attributes on elements. Take this HTML markup:

<UL type="compact">
</UL>

var ULele = document.createElement("UL");
var typeAttr = document.createAttribute("type");
typeAttr.value = "compact";
ULele.setAttributeNode(typeAttr);

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

name contains an illegal character.

Creates an Attr node with the nodeName and name set to qualifiedName, namespaceURI set to namespaceURI and prefix and localName extracted from qualifiedName. The value is the empty string. The attribute can be applied to an element using that object's setAttributeNode method. See also createAttribute.

This method allows values to be set on attributes on elements. Take this XML markup:

<nsn:myList xmlns:nsn="http://my.website.com/nsn" nsn:type="compact"/>

var myListEle = document.createElement("myList");
var typeAttr = document.createAttributeNS("http://my.website.com/nsn", "nsn:type");
typeAttr.value = "compact";
myListEle.setAttributeNode(typeAttr);

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

qualifiedName contains an illegal character.

NAMESPACE_ERR

qualfiedName is otherwise malformed (e.g. has a prefix but the namespaceURI is null).

Creates a CDATASection node with the value set to data. Characters within the node are not parsed for markup, so do not need to be escaped. CDATA Sections are used in markup like this:

<script><![CDATA[if (a < b) foo()]]></script>

The "<" in the script will not be parsed by the markup processor. To create the CDATA section, the following could be coded:

var CDATAnode = document.createCDATASection("if (a < b) foo()");

The exceptions thrown are:

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR

This document type does not support CDATASection nodes (e.g. HTML documents).

Creates a Comment node with the value set to data. Comment nodes represent the

<!-- Comment text -->

See DocumentFragment for use and examples.

Creates an Element node with the tagName set to tagname. namespaceURI, prefix and localName are null. See also createElementNS.

For example, to create an HTML unordered list element, one would code

var ULele = document.createElement("UL");

<UL>
</UL>

<UL/>

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

tagname contains an illegal character.

Creates an Element node with the nodeName and tagName set to qualifiedName, namespaceURI set to namespaceURI and prefix and localName extracted from qualifiedName. See also createElement.

For example,

<nsn:myList xmlns:nsn="http://my.website.com/nsn"/>

var myListEle = document.createElementNS("http://my.website.com/nsn", "nsn:myList");

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

qualifiedName contains an illegal character.

NAMESPACE_ERR

qualfiedName is otherwise malformed (e.g. has a prefix but the namespaceURI is null).

WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR

doctype is referenced in another Document object or was created under a different DOMImplementation.

See EntityReference and Entity for use and examples.

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

name contains an illegal character.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR

This document type does not support Entity references (e.g. HTML documents).

See ProcessingInstruction for use and examples.

The exceptions thrown are:

INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR

target contains an illegal character.

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR

This document type does not support processing instructions (e.g. HTML documents).

See Text for use and examples. Text nodes hold text for Elements and Attrs.

Returns the Element with an Attr named "ID" whose value is elementID, if present in the document. Otherwise, null.

Note that "ID" attributes should be unique within a document. Should this rule be violated, the behaviour of this method is undefined.

Note, also, that it's actually up to the implementation to decide what attribute to use as the ID. It's not necessarily one named "ID".

Returns a NodeList containing Elements with the given tagname (or an empty list if none is present). "*" matches everything.

Returns a NodeList containing Elements with the given namespaceURI and localName (or an empty list if none is present). "*" matches everything and can be specified for either or both parameters.

The standard is actually crystal clear on this method. It says:

Imports a node from another document to this document. The returned node has no parent; (parentNode is null). The source node is not altered or removed from the original document; this method creates a new copy of the source node.

For all nodes, importing a node creates a node object owned by the importing document, with attribute values identical to the source node's nodeName and nodeType, plus the attributes related to namespaces (prefix, localName, and namespaceURI). As in the cloneNode operation on a Node, the source node is not altered.

Additional information is copied as appropriate to the nodeType, attempting to mirror the behavior expected if a fragment of XML or HTML source was copied from one document to another, recognizing that the two documents may have different DTDs in the XML case.

The exceptions thrown are:

NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR

This document type does not support the node type being imported.