The Document Object Model (DOM) is a standard defined by the W3C for accessing and manipulating HTML and XML documents from JavaScript. The DOM represents an HTML document as nodes and objects that can be manipulated. This allows JavaScript to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a document. All browsers follow the DOM standard, allowing JavaScript code to work consistently across browsers. The DOM represents the document as a tree structure wherein each element, attribute, and piece of text is a node. This allows JavaScript to access any element in an HTML document, modify its content, and add or remove elements.