The rest of this book contains a quick-reference for the core and client-side JavaScript APIs. It documents the complete core JavaScript API, covers the legacy (Level 0) DOM API, and presents a simplified view of the W3C Level 2 DOM API. Portions of that API not relevant to JavaScript programmers working with HTML documents have been omitted. The upper-right corner of the title block for each reference entry contains information that states whether a feature is part of the core or client-side API, and further indicates which version of JavaScript, which browsers, or which version of the DOM introduced the feature.

DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, is the result of combining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: it uses scripts to dynamically modify the style — which may include the position and visibility — of document elements. In the W3C and the IE 4 DOMs, every document element has a style property that corresponds to the HTML style attribute that specifies inline styles. Instead of referring to a simple string, however, the style property refers to a Style object that has properties corresponding to each of the CSS attributes of the style.

Most news media (newspapers, television and radio stations, and magazines) are owned by corporations that rely on other companies to place advertisements and help the media pay their bills. So what are the odds that a newspaper will run a story criticizing a major advertiser, or run a story exposing the media’s corporate owner? More importantly, what news company is going to risk raising the ire of its own government, when doing so could jeopardize that company from attending any future government press conferences that their competitors will surely attend? If you think that any of the news sources listed in this chapter are free from any bias, influence, or censorship, it’s time to rethink your perception of how the news media really works. Every year, Project Censored (http://www.projectcensored.org) offers their top ten stories that the news media conveniently ignored, that inevitably turn out to be major environmental, political, or social disasters that make a prominent corporation or government look corrupt, exploitive, or just plain incompetent.

Netscape has defined a number of versions of JavaScript. Microsoft has released more-or-less compatible versions under the name "JScript," and the ECMA standards body has released three versions of a JavaScript standard named "ECMAScript". The following paragraphs describe these various versions, and explain how they relate to each other. Each entry in the reference section contains availability information that documents the version of JavaScript in which a feature was introduced.