XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Node and Other Generic Interfaces

The Node interface is the DOM Core class hierarchy’s root. Though never instantiated directly, it is the root interface of all specific interfaces, and you can use it to extract information from any object within a DOM document tree without knowing its actual type. It is possible to access a document’s complete structure and content using only the methods and properties exposed by the Node interface. As shown in Table 19-1, this interface contains information about the type, location, name, and value of the corresponding underlying document data.

Table 19-1. The Node interface

Name	Type	Read-only	2.0	3.0
Attributes
attributes	NamedNodeMap
baseURI	DOMString
childNodes	NodeList
firstChild	Node
lastChild	Node
localName	DOMString
namespaceURI	DOMString
nextSibling