The DOM Browser

The ability to validate web content and DHTML applications is made possible via a "DOM browser". Upon loading a web page, nearly every browser represents the contents of that page in a Document Object Model (DOM). Most of these models are in accord with the DOM Level 2 specification published by the W3c.

In dynamic web applications, the DOM is manipulated and modified to introduce or remove elements in response to user actions. The AJAX Tooling Framework (ATF) uses a Mozilla-based browser to expose the live DOM to Java applications via the cross-platform component object model or XPCOM. Using this browser and XPCOM, ACTF can inspect and monitor this DOM for changes in order to yield validation reports of web content. This technique differs from other web validation tools in that the live DOM (rather than the static HTML authored by a web page designer or generated by a server) is the source of the validations, much as the actual GUI objects in a JVM (rather than the source code that instantiated and configured them) are the targets in Java rich-client GUI validations.