Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

JavaScript DOM Scripting By Example Editing and Filtering Names Filter Invitees Who Have Not Responded

Begana Choi
PLUS
Begana Choi
Courses Plus Student 13,126 Points

why can't I use parentNode property to traverse list Items?

in this video, I found that using children property to traverse all the list Item in ul but why should I use children property instead of parentNode?

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,236 Points

These are used to do different things. The children of a node are the items that it contains, but the parent is the item it is contained by. For example, say you have some HTML like this:

<div class="parent">
    <ul class="target">
        <li class="child">Item 1</li>
        <li class="child">Item 2</li>
        <li class="child">Item 3</li>
    </ul>
</div>

So starting with a reference to the ul element, the children would be the 3 list items, but the parent (parentNode) would be the div that contains it.