Elements represent most of the "markup" and structure of the document. They contain both the data for the element itself (element name and attributes), and any contained nodes, including document text (as children).

Elements may have Attributes associated with them; the API for this is defined in Node, but the function is implemented here. In general, XML applications should retrive Attributes as Nodes, since they may contain entity references and hence be a fairly complex sub-tree. HTML users will be dealing with simple string values, and convenience methods are provided to work in terms of Strings.

DeferredElementImpl inherits from ElementImpl which does not support Namespaces. DeferredElementNSImpl, which inherits from ElementNSImpl, does.