The nodeType Property

The nodeType Property

The nodeType property returns a numeric value indicating the type of a node. You can see the support for this property in Table 5.37.

Table 5.37. The nodeType Property

Property	NS2	NS3	NS4	NS6	IE3a	IE3b	IE4	IE5	IE5.5	IE6
nodeType				x				x	x	x
	Read/Write
	Type: Integer

You can see the possible node type values in Table 5.38; here, I'm including all possible values for both XML and HTML documents, because you can mix HTML and XML documents in the Internet Explorer (more on this in Chapter 22, "XML and XSLT"). The only valid node types for HTML nodes are 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Table 5.38. W3C Node Types

Number	Means
1	Element
2	Attribute
3	Text node
4	CDATA (character data) section
5	Entity reference
6	Entity node
7	Processing instruction
8	Comment
9	Document node
10	Document Type Definition (DTD)
11	Document fragment
12	Notation

For an example using this property, see the nodeName topic earlier in this chapter.