Difference between Node object and Element object?

Asked 2012-04-02T15:28:14.630

456

I am totally confused between Node object and Element object. document.getElementById() returns Element object while document.getElementsByClassName() returns NodeList object (Collection of Elements or Nodes?)

If a div is an Element Object then what about div Node object?

What is a Node Object?

Are document object, Element object and Text Object are also Node object?

As per David Flanagan's book 'The Document object, Its Element Objects and text objects are all Node objects'.

So How come an object can inherit properties/methods of Element object as well as Node object?

If yes, I guess Node Class and Element Class are related in prototypal tree of inheritance.

 <div id="test">
           <p class="para"> 123 </p>
           <p class="para"> abc </p>
 </div>
 <p id="id_para"> next </p>

document.documentElement.toString();    // [object HTMLHtmlElement]

var div = document.getElementById("test");
div.toString();                         // [object HTMLDivElement]                       

var p1 = document.getElementById("id_para");
p1.toString();                          // [object HTMLParagraphElement]

var p2 = document.getElementsByClassName("para");
p2.toString();                          //[object HTMLCollection]

javascript html dom

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A node is the generic name for any type of object in the DOM hierarchy. A node could be one of the built-in DOM elements such as document or document.body, it could be an HTML tag specified in the HTML such as <input> or <p> or it could be a text node that is created by the system to hold a block of text inside another element. So, in a nutshell, a node is any DOM object.

An element is one specific type of node as there are many other types of nodes (text nodes, comment nodes, document nodes, etc...).

The DOM consists of a hierarchy of nodes where each node can have a parent, a list of child nodes and a nextSibling and previousSibling. That structure forms a tree-like hierarchy. The document node has the html node as its child. The html node has its list of child nodes (the head node and the body node). The body node would have its list of child nodes (the top level elements in your HTML page) and so on.

So, a nodeList is simply an array-like list of nodes.

An element is a specific type of node, one that can be directly specified in the HTML with an HTML tag and can have properties like an id or a class. can have children, etc... There are other types of nodes such as comment nodes, text nodes, etc... with different characteristics. Each node has a property .nodeType which reports what type of node it is. You can see the various types of nodes here (diagram from MDN):

enter image description here

You can see an ELEMENT_NODE is one particular type of node where the nodeType prope

answered 2012-04-02T16:05:43.390

Node : http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_htmldom_nodes.asp

The Node object represents a single node in the document tree. A node can be an element node, an attribute node, a text node, or any other of the node types explained in the Node Types chapter.

Element : http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_htmldom_elements.asp

The Element object represents an element in an XML document. Elements may contain attributes, other elements, or text. If an element contains text, the text is represented in a text-node.

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answered 2012-04-02T15:33:25.560

Difference between Node object and Element object?

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