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Leo Marco Corpuz
18,975 PointsTraversing the DOM practice. Using "Element"
On the Traversing the DOM practice, is it ok to leave out "Element" with DOM relations (example previousSibling instead of previousElementSibling)?
2 Answers
James Nakolah
10,542 Points
previousElementSiblingis an improvement ofpreviousSibling.
What I mean here is while previousSibling may in most cases work out just fine depending on how you've structured your html, it is important to understand that previousSibling points to the previous node in the dom structure. The problem will come when you have an empty text node or some other node type between your elements, this will definitely lead to unexpected behaviour. previousElementSibling on the other hand ensures it's an element and leaves out other node types.
Doron Geyer
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 13,897 PointsLeo Marco Corpuz the Element bit is necessary because of how javascript structures some things. In the tutorial they showed an example where in an unordered list if you use previous element it returns an empty string instead of the previous element which would be a list item. so Adding Element just ensures that it will always return an HTML element rather than sometimes returning something you dont expect.