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Louise Iyengar
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 21,991 PointsparentNode vs parentElement
In the 'Traversing the DOM' course, parentNode is used to select a parent element. I was wondering why parentElement would not be used, since parentNode might not return an HTML element. Is it because of browser support? Whan I used parentElement in the final practice, it seemed to work fine. Thanks.
2 Answers
Steven Parker
242,796 PointsThe parentNode method will always return the parent, but parentElement will return null if the parent happens to be something other than an element. So unless you're prepared to test for a null return you probably don't want parentElement.
Also, for practical purposes the parent node of an element will nearly always be an element, unless it's the document object itself.
Louise Iyengar
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Graduate 21,991 PointsThanks for this clear response.