The W3C Web API Working Group has published the finished recommendation
of
Element Traversal Specification. "This specification defines the ElementTraversal interface, which allows script navigation of the elements of a DOM tree, excluding all other nodes in the DOM, such as text nodes. It also provides an attribute to expose the number of child elements of an element. It is intended to provide a more convenient alternative to existing DOM navigation interfaces, with a low implementation footprint."
ElementTraversal provides some extra properties/methods for navigating only through elements, while ignoring text and white space:
firstElementChildlastElementChildpreviousElementSiblingnextElementSiblingchildElementCountThis makes it easier to process record-like XML, but inappropriate for reading documents with mixed content. It may be mildly helpful if it achieves broad adoption in browsers. However at this point adding more methods to DOM is just putting lipstick on a pig. Until we admit that DOM was a mistake, we can't really begin to address our problems.
