The W3C recommendation document can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html.

The DOM2 Core interfaces provide methods that allow a document's content and structure to be manipulated. A document's structure is represented by a hierarchy of nodes of different types. The permitted parent/child relationships depend on the document type (i.e. HTML or XML, etc.).

For cross-platform consistency, the following elementary data types are defined:

• DOMString
• DOMTimeStamp

  The W3C site also has a full IDL definition of the DOM which provides formal definitions of each interface. The definitions in the guide will use either Java or ECMAScript.

The following object types are required in any conforming implementation:

• DOMException
• DOMImplementation
• NamedNodeMap
• Node, for which the following nodeTypes exist:
  • Attr
  • CharacterData, which is an extension of Node rather than a nodeType, for which the following nodeTypes exist:
    • Comment
    • Text
  • Document
  • DocumentFragment
  • Element
• NodeList