DOM Functions

(Merge only)

When scripting inside a form one has available the _document DOM, and some other DOMs. For the most part, you will want to access properties (see DOM Properties Accessing the Document Structures of the various objects in the DOM. In fact, navigation between objects in the DOM, is done via properties (e.g. _firstChild, _nextNode).

Those navigation properties yield a DOM object. Actually one of the most common DOM objects is the this object, which is the object to which your script is attached. Let's refer to those DOM objects generically, as domObj. For documentation table of contents and indexing purposes, we will say domObj.function, but that really means any DOM object, most notably the this object of the moment.

Note that by convention, all properties begin with "_" (underscore). Functions do not. All functions are followed by (possible arguments). Hence a leading underscore is not required to differentiate the function reference from some lower-level DOM object in the DOM tree.