Introduction to the DOM

The power of JavaScript is its use in dynamically displaying and manipulating elements on a webpage written in HTML. We know that an HTML page consists of elements such as <head><body> <h1> tags or text fields and buttons. The DOM or Document Object Model represents the structure of these elements as a "tree" data structure after your web browser reads a page. The DOM Application Programming Interface (API) contains methods that provide JavaScript access to these elements. Start by reading this article to learn about the document structure of the DOM and how to find, create and change elements.

Almost everything about the DOM data structure can be changed. The shape of the document tree can be modified by changing parent-child relationships. Nodes have a remove method to remove them from their current parent node. To add a child node to an element node, we can use appendChild, which puts it at the end of the list of children, or insertBefore, which inserts the node given as the first argument before the node given as the second argument.

<p>One</p>
<p>Two</p>
<p>Three</p>

<script>
  let paragraphs = document.body.getElementsByTagName("p");
  document.body.insertBefore(paragraphs[2], paragraphs[0]);
</script>

A node can exist in the document in only one place. Thus, inserting paragraph Three in front of paragraph One will first remove it from the end of the document and then insert it at the front, resulting in Three/One/Two. All operations that insert a node somewhere will, as a side effect, cause it to be removed from its current position (if it has one).

The replaceChild method is used to replace a child node with another one. It takes as arguments two nodes: a new node and the node to be replaced. The replaced node must be a child of the element the method is called on. Note that both replaceChild and insertBefore expect the new node as their first argument.