When you are building a web application, you will be working with the Document Object Model (DOM). I discussed how the DOM is referred to as a tree. The DOM has built-in methods and properties that allow us to traverse the DOM (climb the tree). Let’s take a look at some of the properties available to us…
- nodeValue – the value stored within the node (excluding elements)
- nodeType – returns the type of the node…text, element, etc. This returns a number code referring to the type. For example, an element is equal to one (1), text is equal to three (3)
- childNodes – hierarchal children of a parent node. This gets returned as an array allowing you to loop over all of the children
- firstChild – the…well…first child of a node
- lastChild – could this be the last child of a node
So what is the key point? DOM properties and methods allow you to change content, structure and so forth while maintaining standards compliance. In future posts, we will look at how to implement some of these properties and methods.
Happy Coding!
Clay Hess
