Water Cooler v2 wrote:

> The relevant text I do not understand is:
> 
> "Internet Explorer, when using node.childNodes[], will NOT contain
> these white-space nodes. In Mozilla, those nodes will be in the
> array."
> 
> and
> 
> "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."
> 
> I checked the said file: http://www.w3schools.com/dom/books.xml
> 
> In both, Firefox 2.0 as well as IE 6.0, it had only 4 <book> elements.

The DOM object model knows different kind of nodes, it knows element 
nodes but it also knows text nodes. In the example document books.xml 
there is white space between the elements as the markup looks like this

<bookstore>
<book category="COOKING">
<title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>

and not like this

<bookstore><book category="COOKING"><title lang="en">Everyday 
Italian</title><author>Giada De 
Laurentiis</author><year>2005</year><price>30.00</price></book><book 
category="CHILDREN"><title lang="en">Harry Potter</title><author>J K. 
Rowling</author><year>2005</year><price>29.99</price></book>

The difference between the DOM implementations is whether such 
whitespace is modelled as text nodes or not.

With Mozilla it is, with IE respectively MSXML it depends on the setting 
of the property preserveWhiteSpace e.g. this example

var xmlDocument = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0');
xmlDocument.async = false;

xmlDocument.preserveWhiteSpace = true;

xmlDocument.load('http://www.w3schools.com/dom/books.xml');

alert(xmlDocument.documentElement.childNodes.length);

xmlDocument.preserveWhiteSpace = false;

xmlDocument.load('http://www.w3schools.com/dom/books.xml');

alert(xmlDocument.documentElement.childNodes.length);

alerts 9 first, then 4.

So with Mozilla and with IE/MSXML with preserveWhiteSpace set to true 
the object model contains white space text nodes between the book 
element nodes.

-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/