DOM turns documents into scriptable objects

A page on screen and its HTML source look different, yet scripts need one stable handle.

I read the DOM as a live tree of nodes that mirrors the document for code.

MDN defines the DOM as an object model for changing structure, style, and page content.

Selectors like querySelector return node lists that scripts can inspect, modify, or remove.

The DOM stays independent of any single language, which keeps its design portable across runtimes.

Because Web APIs live in the runtime, not the language, the DOM stays scriptable everywhere, and History API restores back button behavior in SPAs leans on those live updates.

I manipulate nodes, never raw markup strings, whenever structure must stay consistent.