What is the "text" child node of the html node?

Question

I have tried to search but have not found an answer to this:

So I know that when a page is passed to or downloaded by a browser a tree structure representation of the page, called the DOM, is generated. Javascript can then be used to manipulate the nodes (objects representing elements) of this tree.

So now if I open Chrome's developer console and execute the command:

document.childNodes;

I get what I expect, namely two nodes which are the DOCTYPE and the html nodes

[<!DOCTYPE html>, html]

If I now assign a variable to the html and then check it's nodes like so:

var htmlNode = document.childNodes[1];
htmlNode.childNodes;

Something weird happens:

I get the "head" node as expected, and then there is a "text" node which I have no idea where it's coming from, then finally the "body" node as expected.

[head, text, body]

My question is where is this "text" node coming from?

Try putting end of head and start of body on same line, you’ll see. — Akxe, Aug 30 '18 at 17:07
Related, but not necessarily a duplicate: [What is the difference between children and childNodes in JavaScript?](https://stackoverflow.com/q/7935689/691711). — zero298, Aug 30 '18 at 17:08
`Hello World` — the text node is the DOM object that holds the text "Hello World". The element node for the `` is the parent of that text node. — Pointy, Aug 30 '18 at 17:09
What Akxe means is that whitespace alone can trigger the creation of a text node. — Pointy, Aug 30 '18 at 17:10
I guess it only means there can be some text between `head` and `body` — JSmith, Aug 30 '18 at 17:25

BoltClock · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-30T17:49:54.213

2

Although HTML says that the html element can only normally contain head and body, inter-element whitespace is of course allowed between any of these elements' start and end tags.

In the HTML DOM, inter-element whitespace is always distributed into text nodes. So, presumably, the text node you're seeing between the head and body element nodes is the inter-element whitespace between the </head> end tag and the <body> start tag.

edited Aug 30 '18 at 17:49

answered Aug 30 '18 at 17:44

BoltClock

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Yes. That's exactly what I was seeing :) – Zuks Aug 30 '18 at 17:57

What is the "text" child node of the html node?

1 Answers1