DOM Essentials for React Developers
Explore the fundamentals of the Document Object Model (DOM) and how JavaScript interacts with it. This lesson helps you grasp DOM structures, element selection, manipulation, event handling, and limitations of manual DOM changes. Understand why React uses a virtual DOM and how it improves performance and code clarity compared to direct DOM manipulation.
The DOM (Document Object Model) is the foundation of web development. It represents the structure of a web page as a tree of objects, allowing JavaScript to dynamically update, style, and interact with content. While React abstracts much of the DOM manipulation process, it is still useful for appreciating React’s power and efficiency.
What is the DOM?
The DOM is a programming interface for HTML and XML documents. It organizes the page as a tree structure, where every element, attribute, and piece of text is a node.
The DOM tree of the above example looks like:
Using JavaScript, we can access and manipulate these nodes to dynamically update the content or appearance of the web page.
Accessing DOM elements
JavaScript provides methods to locate and access DOM elements: ...