↑
Main Page

Node.DOCUMENT_NODE

The

node is considered the ancestor of all nodes in this section of the tree, including its

children (the comment and

) as well as their children (

<name/>

, and so on,

all the way down to the text node

“His birthday is on 8/14/68”

). The document node is consid-

ered the ancestor of all nodes in the document.

The

Node

interface defines 12 constants that map to the different node types (and are used by the

nodeType

property discussed later):

Node.ELEMENT_NODE

(1)

Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE

(2)

Node.TEXT_NODE

(3)

Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE

(4)

Node.ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE

(5)

Node.ENTITY_NODE

(6)

Node.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE

(7)

Node.COMMENT_NODE

(8)

Node.DOCUMENT_NODE

(9)

Node.DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE

(10)

Node.DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE

(11)

Node.NOTATION_NODE

(12)

The

Node

interface also defines a set of properties and methods that all node types contain. These prop-

erties and methods are listed out in the following table:

Property/Method

Type/Return Type Description

nodeName

String

The name of the node; this is defined depending

on the type of node.

nodeValue

String

The value of the node; this is defined depending

on the type of node.

nodeType

Number

One of the node type constant values

ownerDocument

Document

Pointer to the document that this node belongs to

firstChild

Node

Pointer to the first node in the

childNodes

list

lastChild

Node

Pointer to the last node in the

childNodes

list

childNodes

NodeList

A list of all child nodes

previousSibling

Node

Pointer to the previous sibling;

null

if this is the

first sibling

Table continued on following page

165

DOM Basics

09_579088 ch06.qxd 3/28/05 11:37 AM Page 165