Node (W3C DOM Core object)

Spec
Version Depr.
DOM1 No
Browser support (more…)
IE5.5+ FF1.5+ SA1.3+ OP9+
Partial Full Buggy Full

Example

<h1 id="greeting">Be excellent to each other</h1>

In the example above, h1 is an Element node, id="greeting" is an Attr node, and the text inside the heading is a Text node.

Description

The Node interface is the primary data type for the Document Object Model (DOM). It represents any single item in the tree, such as an Element, Attr, Document or Entity.

Whether a Node may have children depends on its type.

The following table is an overview of each of the core interfaces, showing how the nodeName and nodeType returns, and what kind of children the node is allowed to have.

Table 1. A summary of universal Node properties
Interface nodeName nodeType Children
Element The tag name, eg. HTML 1 Element, Text, Comment, ProcessingInstruction, CDATASection, EntityReference
Attr The attribute name, eg. id 2 Text, EntityReference 1
Text #text 3 Cannot have children
CDATASection #cdata-section 4 Cannot have children
EntityReference The name of the entity reference, eg. amp 5 Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
Entity The entity name, eg. & 6 Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
ProcessingInstruction The target of the processing instruction, eg. xml-stylesheet 7 Cannot have children
Comment #comment 8 Cannot have children
Document #document 9 Element (one only), ProcessingInstruction, Comment, DocumentType (one only)
DocumentType The name of the document type, eg. html 10 Cannot have children
DocumentFragment #document-fragment 11 Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
Notation The notation name 12 Cannot have children

Compatibility

Internet Explorer Firefox Safari Opera
5.5 6.0 7.0 1.5 2.0 3.0 1.3 2.0 3.0 9.0 9.5
Partial Partial Partial Full Full Full Buggy Buggy Buggy Full Full

Internet Explorer doesn't implement the following:

Additionally, Internet Explorer 5.5 doesn't implement the following:

Internet Explorer has additional features in its implementation of childNodes and attributes.

Safari has bugs in its implementation of childNodes.

Safari 1.3 and 2 have bugs in their implementation of localName.

Opera has additional features in its implementation of childNodes.

All browsers have bugs in their implementation of attributes.

In this Section

  • appendChild
    Add a new node and its subtree to the end of the list of children of this node.
  • attributes
    An unordered list of all the effective attributes that apply to an element.
  • childNodes
    An ordered list of all the child nodes of this node.
  • cloneNode
    Create a duplicate of this node, including all attributes and their values.
  • firstChild
    The first node that is a direct child of this node.
  • hasAttributes
    Whether an element has any attributes.
  • hasChildNodes
    Returns whether this node has any child nodes.
  • insertBefore
    Insert a new node as a child of this node, directly before an existing child of this node.
  • isSupported
    Whether a specific feature of the DOM is implemented, and supported by this node.
  • lastChild
    The last node that is a direct child of this node.
  • localName
    The name of an element or attribute, not including any namespace prefix.
  • namespaceURI
    The namespace URI of an element or attribute node.
  • nextSibling
    The node immediately after this node.
  • nodeName
    The name of this node, according to its type.
  • nodeType
    A numeric code that represents the type of this node.
  • nodeValue
    The value if this node, if it has one.
  • normalize
    Puts this node's sub-tree in a state whereby only structural nodes separate text nodes.
  • ownerDocument
    The document which contains this node.
  • parentNode
    The parent of this node.
  • prefix
    The namespace prefix of this node.
  • previousSibling
    The node immediately before this node.
  • removeChild
    Removes a specified node from the children of this node.
  • replaceChild
    Replace an existing child of this node with a new child node.

Footnotes

1 Whether the value of an attribute can actually be processed as a child of the attribute node varies widely by implementation. For more details please see Attr

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