Entry

How do I access constants of a DOM interface with JavaScript?

How do I access the different node types?

Apr 27th, 2000 02:02
Rey Nuņez, Martin Honnen,

W3C DOM LEVEL 1 (and 2 too) specifies some constants for interfaces for 
example, the "Node" interface defines the following constants:

  const unsigned short      ELEMENT_NODE                   = 1;
  const unsigned short      ATTRIBUTE_NODE                 = 2;
  const unsigned short      TEXT_NODE                      = 3;
  const unsigned short      CDATA_SECTION_NODE             = 4;
  const unsigned short      ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE          = 5;
  const unsigned short      ENTITY_NODE                    = 6;
  const unsigned short      PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE    = 7;
  const unsigned short      COMMENT_NODE                   = 8;
  const unsigned short      DOCUMENT_NODE                  = 9;
  const unsigned short      DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE             = 10;
  const unsigned short      DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE         = 11;
  const unsigned short      NOTATION_NODE                  = 12;

These are scriptable in NN6 as static properties of the Node object e.g.
  Node.ELEMENT_NODE
  Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE
Unfortunately IE5 is neither exposing the Node object nor its static 
properties so with IE5 you are forced to hard code the constants' 
values.

~ ~ ~

In DOM-compliant browsers (IE5/NN6), you can retrieve (but not set) the 
type of the given node in the following notation: 

iType = oNode.nodeType 

where iType specifies an integer (as shown in the above table) 
indicating the nodeType of the requested node, which also determines 
the valid values for the node, and whether the node can have child 
nodes. The property is read-only.