Element vs Node

Written byPhuoc Nguyen

Created

23 May, 2020

Category

HTML

Imagine that a web page is constructed by a tree of nodes. Considering a common HTML page has a structure like this:

html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta ... />
        <title>...</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        ...
    </body>
</html>

The root node of tree is a document node which has two children, the `doctype` and the `html` tag. The `html` tag is constructed by its children, `head` and `body`, and so on.

Each node has a property named `nodeType` which is a number to identity its type. It can be used to distinguish the kind of node from other one. For example, the following `div` has only one child node whose value is `Hello`:

html

<div>Hello</div>

The `div` node is an element node, while its child node (`Hello`) is a text node. The following table taken from MDN shows the popular node types:

`Node.ELEMENT_NODE` (1): An element node which is a HTML tag, such as `<div>`, `<p>` , etc.
`Node.TEXT_NODE` (3): The actual text inside an element node
`Node.COMMENT_NODE` (8): A comment node, such as ``
`Node.DOCUMENT_NODE` (9): A document node
`Node.DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE` (10): A document type node, such as `<!DOCTYPE html>`

In a nutshell, a node represents a single node in the document tree, and an element is a particular type of node which is a HTML tag.

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Element vs Node

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