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

How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code - 7th February 2026
Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly - 6th February 2026
Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel - 4th February 2026

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

chrome 44 data-structures 6 firefox 90 html 94 internet-explorer 74 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