How would you describe your web page without mentioning its content?

One way would be to describe the page’s structure. What tags are on the page? How many are there? What order are they in? What are the properties of these tags? And finally, what is the presentational nature of each element? This is what the Document Object Model does. It expresses the structure of an HTML document in a universal, content-neutral way.

One of my first Webmonkey articles was about displaying random images. I twiddled with image tags on a page so they pointed to different image files over time. It was a simple concept: You have an arbitrary number of images on a page, a few of which the computer would randomly change about five times a second. The effect was a flashing, mutating space that I liked a lot.

I didn’t know it back then, but what I was doing was manipulating the Document Object Model of that page. I had a number of objects on the page. My script would then query out the number of images, and then modify an attribute of that object (i.e., switch out the sources of the images).

This was about the limit of what you could do with the Document Object Model in Netscape 3. You could read and write the attributes of image and anchor tags, and you could query some information about the browser itself – what MIME-types it accepted, what plug-ins were installed, its location, and a few other things. Simple, basic, down-to-earth, level-zero items.