This specification is like no other — it has been processed with you, the humble web developer, in mind.
The focus of this specification is readability and ease of access. Unlike the full HTML Standard, this "developer's edition" removes information that only browser vendors need know. It is automatically produced from the full specification by our build tooling, and thus always in sync with the latest developments in HTML.
To read about its conception, construction, and future, read the original press release, and the blog post about its relaunch.
Finally, feel free to contribute on GitHub to make this edition better for everyone!
APIs for dynamically inserting markup into the document interact with the parser, and thus their behavior varies depending on whether they are used with HTML documents (and the HTML parser) or XML documents (and the XML parser).
The open() method comes in several variants
with different numbers of arguments.
open( [ type [, replace ] ] )Causes the Document to be replaced in-place, as if it was a new
Document object, but reusing the previous object, which is then returned.
If the type argument is omitted or has the value
"text/html", then the resulting Document has an HTML parser associated
with it, which can be given data to parse using document.write(). Otherwise, all content passed to document.write() will be parsed as plain text.
If the replace argument is present and has the value "replace", the existing entries in the session history for the
Document object are removed.
The method has no effect if the Document is still being parsed.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
Document is an XML document.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
parser is currently executing a custom element constructor.
open( url, name, features )Works like the window.open() method.
close()Closes the input stream that was opened by the document.open() method.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
Document is an XML document.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
parser is currently executing a custom element constructor.
document.write()write(text...)In general, adds the given string(s) to the Document's input stream.
This method has very idiosyncratic behavior. In some cases, this method can
affect the state of the HTML parser while the parser is running, resulting in a DOM
that does not correspond to the source of the document (e.g. if the string written is the string
"<plaintext>" or "<!--"). In other cases,
the call can clear the current page first, as if document.open() had been called. In yet more cases, the method
is simply ignored, or throws an exception. Users agents are explicitly allowed to avoid executing
script elements inserted via this method. And to make matters even worse, the
exact behavior of this method can in some cases be dependent on network latency, which can lead to failures that are very hard to debug. For all these reasons, use
of this method is strongly discouraged.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException when
invoked on XML documents.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
parser is currently executing a custom element constructor.
document.writeln()writeln(text...)Adds the given string(s) to the Document's input stream, followed by a newline
character. If necessary, calls the open() method
implicitly first.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException when
invoked on XML documents.
Throws an "InvalidStateError" DOMException if the
parser is currently executing a custom element constructor.