XML DOM Mozilla vs. Internet Explorer

Browser-differences in DOM Parsing

Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer supports W3C's DOM specification.

However, there are still differences between Internet Explorer's DOM and Mozilla's DOM. The most important difference is how they handle white-space text nodes. When XML generates, it often contains white-spaces between the nodes. Internet Explorer, when using node.childNodes[], will NOT contain these white-space nodes. In Mozilla, those nodes will be in the array.

Look at the following XML file: books.xml

The following code fragment alerts how many child nodes the root element have:

xmlDoc.load("books.xml");
var x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;

alert(x.length)

for (i=0;i<x.length;i++)
  {
  document.write(x[i].nodeType);
  document.write("<br />");
  }

Try it yourself

Internet Explorer will skip the white-space text nodes that are generated between nodes (e.g. new line characters), while Mozilla will not. So, in the example above, Mozilla browsers will alert 9 child nodes, while Internet Explorer will alert 4.

To iterate through the child nodes and disregard those text nodes, you can check the node type. An element node has type 1, a text node has type 3, and a comment node has type 8. To skip text nodes, you can process only nodes that are not of node type 3 (text nodes) and node type 8 (comment nodes):

xmlDoc.load("books.xml");
var x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;

for (var i=0;i<x.length;i++)
  { 
  if ((x[i].nodeType!=3)&&(x[i].nodeType!=8))
    {
    //Do not process text nodes or comment nodes 
    document.write(x[i].nodeName);
    document.write("<br />");
    } 
  }

Try it yourself

The best way to only process element nodes is to iterate through the child nodes and only process those with a node type of 1:

xmlDoc.load("books.xml");
var x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;

for (var i=0;i<x.length;i++)
  { 
  if (x[i].nodeType==1)
    { 
    //Process only element nodes
    document.write(x[i].nodeName);
    document.write("<br />");
    } 
  }

For a complete reference of all the node types and which children they may have, go to our Node types reference.

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