DOM Essentials for React Developers

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: ...