13 November, 2000

# Glossary

Editors
  Arnaud Le Hors, IBM
  Lauren Wood, SoftQuad Software Inc.
  Robert S. Sutor, IBM (for DOM Level 1)

Several of the following term definitions have been borrowed or modified from similar definitions in other W3C or standards documents. See the links within the definitions for more information.

16-bit unit
  The base unit of a `DOMString`. This indicates that indexing on a `DOMString` occurs in units of 16 bits. This must not be misunderstood to mean that a `DOMString` can store arbitrary 16-bit units. A `DOMString` is a character string encoded in UTF-16; this means that the restrictions of UTF-16 as well as the other relevant restrictions on character strings must be maintained. A single character, for example in the form of a numeric character reference, may correspond to one or two 16-bit units.
  For more information, see [Unicode] and [ISO/IEC 10646].
ancestor
  An ancestor node of any node A is any node above A in a tree model of a document, where "above" means "toward the root."
child
  A child is an immediate descendant node of a node.
deepest
  The deepest element is that element which is furthest from the root or document element in a tree model of the document.
document order
  The term document order has the same meaning as depth first, pre-order traversal, which is equivalent to the order in which the start tags occur in the text representation of the document.
descendant
  A descendant node of any node A is any node below A in a tree model of a document, where "above" means "toward the root."
parent
  A parent is an immediate ancestor node of a node.
sibling
  Two nodes are siblings if and only if they have the same parent node.
tokenized
  The description given to various information items (for example, attribute values of various types, but not including the StringType CDATA) after having been processed by the XML processor. The process includes stripping leading and trailing white space, and replacing multiple space characters by one. See the definition of tokenized type.