The Text interface is defined in the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification. (Refer to http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113.)

The Text interface inherits from CharacterData and represents the textual content (termed character data in XML) of an Element or Attr. If there is no markup inside an element's content, the text is contained in a single object implementing the Text interface that is the only child of the element. If there is markup, it is parsed into the information items (elements, comments, etc.) and Text nodes that form the list of children of the element.

When a document is first made available via the DOM, there is only one Text node for each block of text. Users may create adjacent Text nodes that represent the contents of a given element without any intervening markup, but should be aware that there is no way to represent the separations between these nodes in XML or HTML, so they will not (in general) persist between DOM editing sessions. The normalize() method on Node merges any such adjacent Text objects into a single node for each block of text.