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Web developer documentation

This page provides links to documentation for web developers (people who write web pages) who are interested in the languages used to write web pages for Mozilla and other browsers that support the same standards.

  1. Writing for Mozilla
  2. Document Formats
  3. Style
  4. Scripting

Writing for Mozilla

Document Formats

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the main document format used on the web. It has both structural (e.g., headings, lists, paragraphs) and presentational (e.g., frames, bold and italic text, and often tables) markup.

XML

XML is a framework for defining markup languages. It is a subset of SGML (in which HTML is defined) designed for use on the Web, and thus has fewer features and stricter error-handling requirements.

Style

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple stylesheet language for HTML and XML. It has a simple declarative syntax that associates style declarations with parts of the document matched by selectors.

Scripting

JavaScript is the programming language most commonly used for scripts in web pages. The DOM is the set of objects that represent the state of the document and how it is displayed. The DOM can be changed through JavaScript to produce dynamic effects.

JavaScript

Document Object Model in Mozilla

"DOM Level 0"

The "DOM Level 0" is the object model that was common across browsers before the W3C started to standardize the DOM.

W3C DOM Level 1

The W3C's DOM Level 1 is an object model that represents and allows dynamic changes to the content of HTML and XML documents.

W3C DOM Level 2 (parts)

The DOM Level 2 is an object model for all the things in DOM Level 1 plus stylesheets, event handling, and many other things.

Discussion of Mozilla documentation takes place on netscape.public.mozilla.documentation. Contributions of documentation are welcome but it may be helpful to discuss significant contributions in advance to avoid duplication. Please email David Baron with any additions or suggestions for this page.