Introduction to DOM manipulation

One of the most important aspects of JavaScript and thereby jQuery, is manipulation of the DOM. DOM stands for Document Object Model and is a mechanism for representing and interacting with your HTML, XHTML or XML documents. It allows you to navigate and manipulate your documents through a programming language, which in the browser will almost always be JavaScript. DOM navigation and manipulation using standard JavaScript can be pretty cumbersome, but fortunately for us, jQuery comes with a bunch of DOM related methods, making it all much easier.

In the first "Hello, world!" example of this tutorial, we compared the job of finding an element and setting the text of it using first jQuery and then JavaScript. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, and in the upcoming chapters you will see just how easy it is to manipulate the content of your documents with jQuery. Read on.