Simon Willison’s Weblog

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('*');