[webkit-dev] DOM tree vs. Render tree

[Charles Pritchard]

On Jun 16, 2011, at 8:53 AM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:

> On Jun 16, 2011, at 7:21 AM, song.7.liu at nokia.com wrote:
> 
>> Could some share what’s the design consideration about the DOM tree and Render tree separation?
> 
> CSS styling makes it easy for almost any DOM node to render as almost anything. To give one trivial example, a paragraph element can be turned into a table cell with "display: table-cell" or removed from rendering entirely with "display: none". The main reason to have a separate render tree is that the structure and classes of the render tree nodes can reflect the post-style-computation decisions of what will actually be rendered, which can be quite a bit different from the structure of the document itself. The DOM tree nodes represent the document’s structure.
> 
>    -- Darin

On the topic of trees: I've used the canvas to swap out and use my own render tree. The ARIA spec has attributed like aria-owns which in some manner, allow one to set an accessibility tree that differs from the Dom tree.

-Charles