By far the vast majority of objects (apart from text) that authors encounter when traversing a document are Element nodes. Assume the following XML document: 

<elementexample id="demo">

	<subelement1/>
 	<subelement2><subsubelement/></subelement2> 
</elementexample>
When represented using DOM, the top node is a Document node containing an Element node for "elementExample" which contains two child Element nodes, one for "subelement1" and one for "subelement2". "subelement1" contains no child nodes. Elements may have attributes associated with them; since the Element interface inherits from Node, the generic Node interface attribute attributes may be used to retrieve the set of all attributes for an element. There are methods on the Element interface to retrieve either an Attr object by name or an attribute value by name. In XML, where an attribute value may contain entity references, an Attr object should be retrieved to examine the possibly fairly complex sub-tree representing the attribute value. On the other hand, in HTML, where all attributes have simple string values, methods to directly access an attribute value can safely be used as a convenience.

Instance Methods Index

o GetTagName()
The name of the element.
o GetAttribute( String name )
Retrieves the attribute value by name.
o SetAttribute( String name, String value )
Adds a new attribute or alters an existing one.
o RemoveAttribute( String name )
Removes an attribute by name.
o GetAttributeNode( String name )
Retrieves an attribute node by name.
o SetAttributeNode( DOMAttr newAttr )
Adds a new attribute node.
o RemoveAttributeNode( DOMAttr oldAttr )
Removes the specified attribute node.
o GetElementsByTagName( String name )
Returns the list of descendant elements with the given name.
o Normalize()
Merges adjacent text nodes.

Instance Methods

o GetTagName 
 String GetTagName()

The name of the element.

Returns:
The name of the element.
o GetAttribute 
 String GetAttribute(
               String name )

Retrieves the attribute value by name.

Parameters:
name  -  The name of the attribute to retrieve
Returns:
The value of the attribute.
o SetAttribute 
 Void SetAttribute(
             String name,
             String value )

Adds a new attribute. If an attribute with that name is already present in the element, its value is changed to be that of the value parameter. This value is a simple string, it is not parsed as it is being set. So any markup (such as syntax to be recognized as an entity reference) is treated as literal text, and needs to be appropriately escaped by the implementation when it is written out. In order to assign an attribute value that contains entity references, the user must create an Attr node plus any Text and EntityReference nodes, build the appropriate subtree, and use setAttributeNode to assign it as the value of an attribute.

Parameters:
name  -  Name of the attribute to create or alter.
value  -  Value to set in string form.
 
o RemoveAttribute 
 Void RemoveAttribute(
              String name )

Removes an attribute by name. If the removed attribute is known to have a default value, an attribute immediately appears containing the default value.

Parameters:
name  -  Name of the attribute to remove.
 
o GetAttributeNode 
 DOMAttr GetAttributeNode(
                  String name )

Retrieves an attribute node by name.

Parameters:
arg1  -  Name of the attribute to retrieve.
Returns:
The DOMAttr node with the specified name (nodeName) or null if there is no such attribute.
o SetAttributeNode 
 DOMAttr SetAttributeNode(
                  DOMAttr newAttr )

Adds a new attribute node. If an attribute with that name (nodeName) is already present in the element, it is replaced by the new one.

Parameters:
newAttr  -  The attribute node to add.
Returns:
If the newAttr attribute replaces an existing attribute, the replaced Attr node is returned, otherwise null is returned.
o RemoveAttributeNode 
 DOMAttr RemoveAttributeNode(
                   DOMAttr oldAttr )

Removes the specified attribute node. If the removed Attr has a default value it is immediately replaced.

Parameters:
oldAttr  -  The attribute node to remove.
Returns:
The Attr node that was removed.
o GetElementsByTagName 
 DOMNodeList GetElementsByTagName(
                        String name )

Returns a NodeList of all descendant elements with a given tag name, in the order in which they would be encountered in a preorder traversal of the Element tree.

Parameters:
name  -  The name of the tag to match on. The special value "*" matches all tags.
Returns:
A list of matching Element nodes.
o Normalize 
 Void Normalize()

Puts all Text nodes in the full depth of the sub-tree underneath this Node, including attribute nodes, into a "normal" form where only markup (e.g., tags, comments, processing instructions, CDATA sections, and entity references) separates Text nodes, i.e., there are no adjacent Text nodes. This can be used to ensure that the DOM view of a document is the same as if it were saved and re-loaded, and is useful when operations (such as XPointer lookups) that depend on a particular document tree structure are to be used.

Note: In cases where the document contains CDATASections, the normalize operation alone may not be sufficient, since XPointers do not differentiate between Text nodes and CDATASection nodes.