Platform-Independent Interface for XML Documents

One of the reasons for today's widespread usage of the XML technologies is that they provide the developers with a standard way of structuring documents and dealing with those documents the same way, regardless of technologies used in conjunction with XML documents.

XML Documents and DOM

To make it even easier to access XML documents from different platforms through different sets of technologies, the World Wide Web Consortium developed a specification of the Application Programming Interface (API) which allows accessing XML and HTML documents through an object model.

This API specification—the Document Object Model (DOM)—is an implementation-independent (that is, platform- and language-neutral) specification of interfaces for accessing the tree structure of the XML documents.