Simon Willison’s Weblog

What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree?

17th February 2013

My answer to What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree? on Quora

You may enjoy this post from Hixie back in 2002 which illustrates how different browsers deal with incorrectly nested HTML. IE6 used to create a tree that wasn’t actually a tree! http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=103791...

Posted 17th February 2013 at 1:31 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025

This is What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree? by Simon Willison, posted on 17th February 2013.

chrome 38 data-structures 6 firefox 90 html 91 ie 63 opera 31 webkit 28 quora 1005 firefoxos 2

Next: Is Lanyrd any good?

Previous: Which restaurants in London serve orange or lemon sorbet served in a hollowed out orange or lemon?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe