Can any one explain to me what is "to poll the DOM" in Selenium?

Question

Whenever I am going through the concept of implicit wait and explicit wait concept in selenium most often I come across the sentence "to poll the DOM".What exactly it means?? I searched in google to find but I didn't find the relevant answer.

Answer 1

It means to check the DOM repeatedly, on a set interval (every X milliseconds), to see if an element exists.

Answer 2

Basically, when using implicit wait, your web driver will "check" for an element of the DOM for a certain amount of time. While when using explicit wait, it will wait until it finds the element. A more clear distinction and maybe what you need can be found in this article:

So, An explicit wait is code you define to wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further in the code. An implicit wait tells WebDriver to poll the DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to find an element or elements if they are not immediately available