What is the W3C standard that describes the elements within a document rendered by a web browser?

The Document Object Model (DOM) is the standard that describes the structure of a document as it is rendered by a web browser. It provides a programming interface for web documents, allowing scripts to manipulate the content, structure, and style of a document. The DOM represents the page so that programs can change the document structure, style, and content dynamically.

In this context, the DOM enables web developers to interact with HTML and XML documents by representing them as a structured tree of objects, each corresponding to a part of the document. For example, each element, attribute, and piece of text in an HTML document becomes a node in this tree, allowing for easy access and modification of these components through programming languages like JavaScript.

Although Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) provides the initial structure of a web page, it does not specifically detail the way a browser interacts with that structure once it is loaded. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is focused on the presentation aspect of web pages, controlling the layout and visual style, while JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a data interchange format primarily used for transmitting data between a server and a client. Thus, the DOM serves as the intermediary between these elements by allowing dynamic manipulation of a document's structure