lastSibling function

[kurt.santo]

Working my way through a very long code I wondered if someone could look at my comments to help me with my open question and see if my comments show that I understood the whole thing correctlly. I have to change certain bits of the code, but do not want to attempt to do so before I understand each bit of where it does what...

	lastSibling:function(node){		//go to parent of relevant node and find last child of parent node		var tempObj=node.parentNode.lastChild;		//nodeType!=1 I do not understand. what does "1" stand for?		//the second test checks that there is a previous sibling		while(tempObj.nodeType!=1 && tempObj.previousSibling!=null){			//when both tests return true, store the previous sibling of the the last child of parent node in tempObj			tempObj=tempObj.previousSibling;		}		//otherwise (while is not true) test if nodeType of the tempObj is 1 and if yes, set it to the tempObj, otherwise return false		return (tempObj.nodeType==1)?tempObj:false;	}

Also, I bought this amazing book with many good examples and would like to share some great codes with you (they are all from a book by Christian Heilman). Is this allowed? And if yes, should I post them here or post here a link with the location of where I put them (might be next week then as we are just in process of buying web space/ domain)?Kurt

[boen_robot]

In XML, the word "node" encompasses anything you can find in a document. Much like "token" in programming languages.A node refers to elements, attributes, text, processing instructions, comments and documents themselves.The nodeType property shows which one of those type of nodes you're dealing with. I'm not sure about what the complete list is, but I know 9 stands for document node and 1 stands for element node.So,

tempObj.nodeType!=1

stands for "if the node is any other than element node".

//otherwise (while is not true)

You're wrong here. The following test will be applied with or without the previous loop ever executing. That's pretty much the reason there is a test(tempObj.nodeType==1) here to begin with.

and if yes, set it to the tempObj

If you mean "return tempObj" - yes.

[kurt.santo]

With an element node being a html tag as <li> or <td> for example?Thank you for your input!Kurt

[boen_robot]

With an element node being a html tag as <li> or <td> for example?

Yes. The only difference between "element" and "tag" being that "tag" refers to the opening ("<li>") or closing ("</li>") part of an element (The opening and closing tags combined).

[justsomeguy]

Here's a list of the node types:http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM:element.nodeType

[kurt.santo]

Thanks to all:-) Just to doble-check on boen_robot's comment:Tag can be either the opening and closing tag (ok, got this one) and element refers to opening and closing tag as a unit as such???Kurt

[justsomeguy]

The element is the object inside the DOM that is represented by the tag(s) on the page. Tags like this:<a href="java script:void(0);">Click</a>will be responsible for having an anchor element created in the DOM with the given href and child node (the "click" text is a text node that is a child of the anchor node). I'm using the terms "node" and "element" interchangeably. The tag is just the code representation of the object in the DOM, or the object in the DOM is the object representation of the code on the page.

[kurt.santo]

The element is the object inside the DOM that is represented by the tag(s) on the page. Tags like this:<a href="java script:void(0);">Click</a>will be responsible for having an anchor element created in the DOM with the given href and child node (the "click" text is a text node that is a child of the anchor node). I'm using the terms "node" and "element" interchangeably. The tag is just the code representation of the object in the DOM, or the object in the DOM is the object representation of the code on the page.

Thank you for your feedback...Kurt