why is js ignoring my td elements?

[garry27]

i've been on this for literally several hours. why is js skipping past the td elements in my table, straight to the text nodes when i use:

[code]
  var tbl = document.getElementById('publist');  // elm.parentNode;
  var nodeX = tbl.rows[0].firstChild;
  alert (nodeX.nodeType);  //displays 3
[/code]

and then when i try to do alert (nodeX.nodeValue) it always displays a blank box.

[artacus]

That's what I get, 1st child is text (new line character), second is td, third is text (\n)...

Use Firefox with firebug extension to checkout what is going on in your DOM.

[garry27]

where's the logic in that if i call for the first child element of a tr in a valid html table and it returns a bloody text node?

[fenway]

Why not use getElementByTagName?

[mrhoo]

A newline inside a tr is a textNode, and the first child of the tr if it immediately follows the opening tag.
IE doesn't see it, or any empty nodes, but the other browsers will. You can use the (tr)element.getElementsByTagName('td')
nodelist, or  keep the newlines outside the table rows in the source.