firstChild can be white space

This is one of those things that bit me just the other day so I figured I’d write up. It’s a fairly simple concept and maybe it’s not something you’d be confused by, but like I said, it got me!

What is the first child of the section here?

<section>
  <div></div>
</div>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

The <div> is the first child of the <section>, right? Wrong! Well, if we’re talking about .firstChild in JavaScript, anyway. The actual firstChild here is what is called a “text node” which will have a value of "\n ". It’s the white space! The return and space before the <div> hits.

(These are just placeholder HTML elements for illustration, they could be any HTML elements.)

If the HTML were like this:

<section><div></div></section>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Then the firstChild of the section would be the <div>.

This same “problem” would be true if there was an HTML comment like <!-- this --> between the <section> and the <div>.

If we wanted to ensure we were getting the first actual HTML element child, we could use a different method. We’d use .firstElementChild instead, which will skip over text nodes and get the first actual HTML element, if there is one. (That’s what helped me.)

I guess I found it confusing as it’s normally not the case that you select text nodes. I don’t even think of them as “selectable” generally. For instance, section :first-child in CSS as a selector will certainly select the <div> not the white space. And if you used that selector in querySelector it would do the same. And if you were to look at the .children of either HTML scenario above, you’d find a single child that is the <div>. So .children[0], which you could be forgiven for thinking would be equal to .firstChild are not indeed equal.

Just a little thing you might need to know: the .firstChild method (and .lastChild!) will return a text node if there is white space (or, of course, other text) within an element.