XML DOM Browser Differences
Browser Differences in DOM Parsing
All modern browsers support the W3C DOM specification.
However, there are some differences
between browsers. One important difference is:
- The way they handle white-spaces and new lines
DOM - White Spaces and New Lines
XML often contains new line, or white space characters, between nodes. This
is often the case when the document is edited by a simple editor like Notepad.
The following example (edited by Notepad) contains CR/LF (new line) between
each line and two spaces in front of each child node:
<book>
<title>Everyday Italian</title>
<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book> |
Internet Explorer will NOT treat empty white-spaces, or new lines as text
nodes, wile other browsers will.
The following code fragment displays how many child nodes the root element
(of books.xml) has:
Example
xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");
x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;
document.write("Number of child nodes: " + x.length);
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Try it yourself »
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Example explained:
- Load "books.xml"
into xmlDoc using loadXMLDoc()
- Get the child nodes of the root element
- Output the number of child nodes. The result is different depending on
which browser you use. IE will alert 4 child nodes, while other browsers
will alert 9
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