Working with Document Nodes and Styles - HTML, CSS, and Dynamic HTML - page 962

Specifying Node Relationships
• To access the parent of a node, use the reference

node .parentNode
where node is a node object in the node tree.
• To reference the first child and last child of a node, use the following references:

node .firstChild
node .lastChild
• To reference the collection of all child nodes, use the following reference:

node .childNodes
• To reference the previous and next siblings, use the following references:

node .previousSibling
node .nextSibling

Creating and Attaching Nodes
To display a dynamic table of contents, you must create the content of the TOC based on
the node structure of the current document. The document object model supports several
methods to create new content; these methods are listed in Figure 14-10.

Figure 14-10 Methods to create nodes

Method Description

document.createAttribute( att )

Creates an attribute node with the name att

document.createComment( text )

Creates a comment node containing the comment text

document.createElement( elem )

Creates an element node with the name elem

document.createTextNode( text )

Creates a text node containing the text string text

node .cloneNode( deep )

Creates a copy of node (If the Boolean parameter deep is
true, the copy extends to all descendants of node ; other-
wise, only node is copied.)

Using these methods, you can create a wide variety of document objects. For exam-
ple, you would use the following expression to create a text node containing the text
Historic Documents Online :

document.createTextNode(“Historic Documents Online”);
All of the methods described in Figure 14-10 create single nodes, with the exception of
the cloneNode() method. The cloneNode() method is useful when you need to create
a copy of an existing node, including any descendants of that node. Thus, the command

var newtitle = title.cloneNode(true);
creates a copy of the title node, including any descendants of that node. The
cloneNode() method provides a quick and easy way to create elements and their con-
tent without having to create each node individually.