Secret Covert Hush-Hush White Space in the DOM…EXPOSED!

Lurking in the shadows of the Stack Overflow website, selling aerosol cans of Bug-No-More to the rubes, I came across a question I thought I could answer. The OP (original poster) was using JavaScript to select and modify HTML elements without success.

The HTML was simple:

<ul>
    <li><a href="#" id="prev">Prev</a></li>
    <li><a href="#" id="middle">Middle</a></li>
    <li><a href="#" id="next">Next</a></li>
</ul>

First he created a simple function to make sure the basics were working (a very good practice). It colored the middle li element and it worked fine:

function middle()
{
    document.getElementById("middle").parentNode.style.backgroundColor = "yellow";
}

• get the middle element using its id (an a tag)
• move up one element via the parentnode (to the li)
• color the li

Next, he created a function to color the siblings of the middle element.

function prevNextSibling()
{
    document.getElementById("middle").parentNode.previousSibling.style.backgroundColor = "pink";

    document.getElementById("middle").parentNode.nextSibling.style.backgroundColor = "cyan";
}

• get the middle element using it's id (an a tag)
• move up one element via the parentnode (to the li)
• get the previous/next sibling
• color the li

It didn't work.

When I debugged the code, I saw that nextSibling was returning an object that did not have a style property. What the heck was up with that?

In FireFox the debugging window looked like this:

In Chrome the debugging window looked like this:

In Internet Explorer the debugging window looked like this:

Hey, what the heck are those "Text = Empty Text Nodes" in the Internet Explorer window? What they are, my curious friend is the cause of the problem: nextSibling and previousSibling are returning Empty Text Nodes which do not have a style attribute.

To be perfectly clear:

• ALL three browsers have Empty Text Nodes.
• ONLY Internet Explorer displays them in its debugger.

Internet Explorer is the best browser in this situation.

So what are these Empty Text Nodes?

http://www.w3.org/DOM/faq.html#emptytext

And what is the fix?

If the siblings are the same type, as they are in the original problem, use:

previousElementSibling

nextElementSibling

Otherwise, move two siblings to skip over the Empty Text Node sibling:

previousSibling.previousSibling

nextSibling.nextSibling

Either way, it works:

Oooh, pretty.

So, in addition to learning about white space nodes in the DOM, we learned that having multiple browsers installed can be a good thing.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Steve Wellens