Reply To: 1.3.04 – Traversing the DOM – Differences between parentElement and parentNode

[John]

I’m also interested in this section. but for a different reason. Zac said to find a site and start traversing the DOM. So i chose the one linked at the bottom of the video DOM Enlightenment Site

it has alot of information in it and a table of contents with an id=”toc”.

So I used
content = document.querySelector( ‘#toc’ );

Then I did this to get the number of children
contentChildrenEls = content.children
HTMLCollection[130]

I then decided to get the first child with this
contentFirstChildNode = content.firstChild

That works fine but I wonder about how I make any sense of all of this. I mean firstly, how do I grab the second child? Next, how do I know there even is a second child? aside from the children property which tells me there are 130.

and what use is this to me anyway? I guess I’m looking at this from outside. If I was the web page developer I would know what my html structure looked like. is that fair to say? in which case I’d be traversing a DOM that I built.

Am I on the right track?

Thanks.

john.