THE GARDEN

HTML parsing and the DOM

Updated 06 Oct 2026

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  HTML and the DOM

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    HTML -> markup language for documents

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    a browser parses HTML into a tree-like Document Object Model (DOM) that scripts and browser APIs can inspect and chagne

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    parsing includes tokenization, tree construction, implied elmeents, and error recovery; malformed input can produce an unexpected DOM

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  XML

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    XML has stricter well-formedness rules, including properly nested tags and explicit handling of case and namespaces

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    HTML and XML have different parsing rules and typical uses

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    DOM -> object representation exposed by APIs, not the original source text

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