Question

I need to be able to have the next element / previous element to change the background color with the current element. How do I do that. The element that I am working is TR, table row, and nextSibling, previousSibling doesn’t do the trick for me, don’t know why ?

Answer 1

I think we have a case here of even the “good” browsers behaving in an extremely annoying way.

Take for example my following table, where the HTML looks like the following:

<table border="1">
    <thead>
    <tr id="header">
        <th>eng</th>
        <th>deu</th>
        <th>spa</th>
    </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
    <tr id="row1">
        <td>one</td>
        <td>eins</td>
        <td>uno</td>
    </tr>
    <tr id="row2">
        <td>spoon</td>
        <td>der Löffel</td>
        <td>la cucharita</td>
    </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

When I open this up in Firefox and go to the console and run the following snippets, notice the how nextSibling behaves:

// My input command
document.getElementById("row1").nextSibling;
// Output from the console
<TextNode textContent="\n ">

I’ve read about this somewhere, and I forget exactly where (Quirksblog, or perhaps from a talk PPK did), so then I tried the following:

// my input command
document.getElementById("row1").nextSibling.nextSibling;
// output from the console
<tr id="row2">

This is one of those moments where our wonderful standards compliant browsers do it (IMHO) absolutely wrong.

To test, I decide to single line the HTML of my table, hence (hopefully it shows up all on one line):

<table border="1"><thead><tr id="header"><th>eng</th><th>deu</th><th>spa</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr id="row1"><td>one</td><td>eins</td><td>uno</td></tr><tr id="row2"><td>spoon</td><td>der Löffel</td><td>la cucharita</td></tr></tbody></table>

And run my test again:

// Hmmm, does nextSibling work _as expected_ now?
document.getElementById("row1").nextSibling;
// yep
<tr id="row2">

Benice, your idea was correct, but you got bit by what I like to think of as an implementation oversight on the browser’s part. I recommend being very careful with HTML DOM relationships cross-browser. Most of them work as expected, but sometimes they don’t.

Ahh, found an article about this after all: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Whitespace_in_the_DOM