Working with Document Nodes and Styles - HTML, CSS, and Dynamic HTML - page 969

Node Types, Names, and Values
As the createList() function loops through the child nodes of the source document, it
will need to be able to distinguish element nodes from text nodes as well as identify the
name of each element node it encounters. JavaScript provides the following properties to
determine each node's type, name, and value:

node .nodeType
node .nodeName
node .nodeValue
The nodeType property returns an integer indicating whether the node refers to an
element, a text string, a comment, an attribute, a document, or another type of node.
The nodeName property returns the name of the node within the document. Finally, the
nodeValue property returns the node's value. Figure 14-17 displays the values of these
three properties for the different types of nodes you'll typically encounter in a Web page
document.

Figure 14-17 node types, names, and values

Node .nodeType .nodeName .nodeValue

Element 1

ELEMENT NAME null

Attribute 2

attribute name attribute value

Text 3

#text text string

Comment 8

#comment comment text

Document 9

#document null

To see how these properties compare to a node tree, Figure 14-18 displays the
nodeType , nodeName , and nodeValue property values for each of the nodes shown
earlier in Figure 14-7.

Figure 14-18 node properties from the sample node tree

Node

.nodeType .nodeName .nodeValue

Document 9

#document null

html 1

HTML null

head 1

HEAD null

body 1

BODY null

title 1

TITLE null

"Historic Documents" 3

#text

Historic Documents

h1 1

H1 null

"Dept. of History" 3

#text

Dept. of History

p 1

P null

"The " 3

#text

The

b 1 B null

"constitution" 3

#text

constitution

" online" 3

#text

online