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XML DOM Browser Differences

Browser Differences in DOM Parsing

All modern browsers support the W3C DOM specification.

However, there are some differences between browsers. One important difference is:

The way they handle white-spaces and new lines

DOM - White Spaces and New Lines

XML often contains new line, or white space characters, between nodes. This is often the case when the document is edited by a simple editor like Notepad.

The following example (edited by Notepad) contains CR/LF (new line) between each line and two spaces in front of each child node:

<book>
<title>Everyday Italian</title>
<author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>

Internet Explorer will NOT treat empty white-spaces, or new lines as text nodes, wile other browsers will.

The following code fragment displays how many child nodes the root element (of books.xml) has:

Example

xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");

x=xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes;
document.write("Number of child nodes: " + x.length);

Try it yourself »

Example explained:

Load "books.xml" into xmlDoc using loadXMLDoc()
Get the child nodes of the root element
Output the number of child nodes. The result is different depending on which browser you use. IE will alert 4 child nodes, while other browsers will alert 9

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