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

However, there are differences between Internet Explorer's DOM and Mozilla's DOM. The most important difference is that how they handle white-space text nodes. When XML generates, it often contain 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 form of array.

Look at the XML file called bookdetails.xml in XML Dom nodes page

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

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

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

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