Traversing the DOM Tree with JavaScript

A beginner’s guide to navigating and manipulating web page elements

Photo by Marita Kavelashvili on Unsplash

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML and XML documents. It represents the structure of a document as a tree-like model, allowing developers to access and modify its content, structure, and style using languages like JavaScript.

This article will focus on traversing the DOM tree, which refers to the process of moving through this tree from one node to another.

Let’s dive into some practical use cases!

Prerequisites

A basic understanding of HTML and JavaScript concepts is recommended before diving into this topic. If you are new to these topics, consider checking out resources such as Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), freeCodeCamp, or Codecademy.

Getting Started

To demonstrate how to traverse the DOM tree, let’s create an example with two paragraphs and three list items inside an ordered list within a <div> element. We will then navigate between these nodes using various methods available in JavaScript.

HTML Structure:

<div id="example">
  <p>First Paragraph</p>
  <ul>
    <li>List Item 1</li>
    <li…