Question

Hi
I’m writing a javascript code to traverse HTML dom and highlight elements.
My problem is firefox returns whitespaces as text node.
Is there any solution to force it to just return tags? for example I need “firstChild” always return first tag and not any text!

Thanks

Answer 1

You can check if a node is an element with node.nodeType === 1.

You can also implement the new DOM Travelsal API as functions.

var dummy = document.createElement("div");
var firstElementChild = ('firstElementChild' in dummy)
    ? function (el) {
      return el.firstElementChild;
    }
    : function (el) {
        el = el.firstChild;
        while (el && el.nodeType !== 1)
            el = el.nextSibling;
        return el;
    }

usage

firstElementChild(el)