Simon Willison’s Weblog

Retrieving all DOM descendants

First observation of the day: IE 5 for Windows doesn’t understand element.getElementsByTagName('*') to retrieve all descendants of an element in the DOM. element.all has the desired effect for that browser. So to retrieve all descendants in a way that will work on standards compliant browsers plus IE 5, the following seems to be the best bet:

var elements = element.all ? element.all : element.getElementsByTagName('*');

Posted 27th March 2003 at 8:12 am

This is Retrieving all DOM descendants by Simon Willison, posted on 27th March 2003.

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2 comments

That'll throw a warning with strict warnings enabled in mozilla. Use object detection instead: var elements=typeof element.all!='undefined'?element.all:element.getEl ementsByTagName('*');
liorean - 27th March 2003 15:03 - #
Retrieving all DOM descendants is good, but how do i determine the size (say width, for example), for all DOM descendants?
Manav - 14th April 2004 11:34 - #

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