Retrieving all DOM descendants
27th March 2003
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('*');
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