A document may have one or more "views" associated with it, e.g., a computed view on a document after applying a CSS stylesheet, or multiple presentations (e.g., HTML Frame) of the same document in a client. That is, a view is some alternate representation of, or a presentation of, and associated with, a source document.
A view may be static, reflecting the state of the document when the view was created, or dynamic, reflecting changes in the target document as they occur, subsequent to the view being created. This Level of the DOM specification makes no statement about these behaviors.
This section defines an AbstractView interface which
provides a base interface from which all such views shall derive. It
defines an attribute which references the target document of the
AbstractView. The only semantics of the AbstractView
defined here create an association between a view and its target document.
There are no subinterfaces of AbstractView defined in the DOM
Level 2.
However, AbstractView is defined in and used in this Level
in two places:
A Document may implement a DocumentView that has a default view
attribute associated with it. This default view is typically dependent on
the implementation (e.g., the browser frame rendering the document). The
default view can be used in order to identify and/or associate a view with
its target document (by testing object equality on the
AbstractView or obtaining the DocumentView
attribute).
A UIEvent typically occurs upon a view of a Document
(e.g., a mouse click on a browser frame rendering a particular Document
instance). A UIEvent has an AbstractView
associated with it which identifies both the particular
(implementation-dependent) view in which the event occurs, and
the target document the UIEvent is related to.
The interfaces found within this section are not mandatory. A DOM
application may use the hasFeature(feature, version) method
of the DOMImplementation interface with parameter values
"Views" and "2.0" (respectively) to determine whether or not this module
is supported by the implementation. In order to fully support this
module, an implementation must also support the "Core" feature defined
defined in the Document Object Model Level 2 Core specification
A base interface that all views shall derive from.
The source DocumentView of which this is an
AbstractView.
The DocumentView interface is implemented by
Document objects in DOM implementations supporting DOM
Views. It provides an attribute to retrieve the default view of a
document.
The default AbstractView for this
Document, or null if none
available.