Capítulo 13
The Document Object Model

When you open a web page in your browser, the browser retrieves the page’s HTML text and parses it, much like the way our parser from Chapter 11 parsed programs. The browser builds up a model of the document’s structure and then uses this model to draw the page on the screen.

This representation of the document is one of the toys that a JavaScript program has available in its sandbox. You can read from the model and also change it. It acts as a live data structure: when it is modified, the page on the screen is updated to reflect the changes.

Document structure

You can imagine an HTML document as a nested set of boxes. Tags such as <body> and </body> enclose other tags, which in turn contain other tags or text. Here’s the example document from the previous chapter:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>My home page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My home page</h1>
    <p>Hello, I am Marijn and this is my home page.</p>
    <p>I also wrote a book! Read it
      <a href="http://eloquentjavascript.net">here</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

This page has the following structure:

The data structure the browser uses to represent the document follows this shape. For each box, there is an object, which we can interact with to find out things such as what HTML tag it represents and which boxes and text it contains. This representation is called the Document Object Model, or DOM for short.

The global variable document gives us access to these objects. Its documentElement property refers to the object representing the <html> tag. It also provides the properties head and body, which hold the objects for those elements.

Trees

Think back to the syntax trees from Chapter 11 for a moment. Their structures are strikingly similar to the structure of a browser’s document. Each node may refer to other nodes, children, which in turn may have their own children. This shape is typical of nested structures where elements can contain sub-elements that are similar to themselves.

We call a data structure a tree when it has a branching structure, has no cycles (a node may not contain itself, directly or indirectly), and has a single, well-defined “root”. In the case of the DOM, document.documentElement serves as the root.

Trees come up a lot in computer science. In addition to representing recursive structures such as HTML documents or programs, they are often used to maintain sorted sets of data because elements can usually be found or inserted more efficiently in a sorted tree than in a sorted flat array.

A typical tree has different kinds of nodes. The syntax tree for the Egg language had variables, values, and application nodes. Application nodes always have children, whereas variables and values are leaves, or nodes without children.

The same goes for the DOM. Nodes for regular elements, which represent HTML tags, determine the structure of the document. These can have child nodes. An example of such a node is document.body. Some of these children can be leaf nodes, such as pieces of text or comments (comments are written between  in HTML).

Each DOM node object has a nodeType property, which contains a numeric code that identifies the type of node. Regular elements have the value 1, which is also defined as the constant property document.ELEMENT_NODE. Text nodes, representing a section of text in the document, have the value 3 (document.TEXT_NODE). Comments have the value 8 (document.COMMENT_NODE).

So another way to visualize our document tree is as follows:

The leaves are text nodes, and the arrows indicate parent-child relationships between nodes.

The standard

Using cryptic numeric codes to represent node types is not a very JavaScript-like thing to do. Later in this chapter, we’ll see that other parts of the DOM interface also feel cumbersome and alien. The reason for this is that the DOM wasn’t designed for just JavaScript. Rather, it tries to define a language-neutral interface that can be used in other systems as well—not just HTML but also XML, which is a generic data format with an HTML-like syntax.

This is unfortunate. Standards are often useful. But in this case, the advantage (cross-language consistency) isn’t all that compelling. Having an interface that is properly integrated with the language you are using will save you more time than having a familiar interface across languages.

As an example of such poor integration, consider the childNodes property that element nodes in the DOM have. This property holds an array-like object, with a length property and properties labeled by numbers to access the child nodes. But it is an instance of the NodeList type, not a real array, so it does not have methods such as slice and forEach.

Then there are issues that are simply poor design. For example, there is no way to create a new node and immediately add children or attributes to it. Instead, you have to first create it, then add the children one by one, and finally set the attributes one by one, using side effects. Code that interacts heavily with the DOM tends to get long, repetitive, and ugly.

But these flaws aren’t fatal. Since JavaScript allows us to create our own abstractions, it is easy to write some helper functions that allow you to express the operations you are performing in a clearer and shorter way. In fact, many libraries intended for browser programming come with such tools.

Moving through the tree

DOM nodes contain a wealth of links to other nearby nodes. The following diagram illustrates these:

Although the diagram shows only one link of each type, every node has a parentNode property that points to its containing node. Likewise, every element node (node type 1) has a childNodes property that points to an array-like object holding its children.

In theory, you could move anywhere in the tree using just these parent and child links. But JavaScript also gives you access to a number of additional convenience links. The firstChild and lastChild properties point to the first and last child elements or have the value null for nodes without children. Similarly, previousSibling and nextSibling point to adjacent nodes, which are nodes with the same parent that appear immediately before or after the node itself. For a first child, previousSibling will be null, and for a last child, nextSibling will be null.

When dealing with a nested data structure like this one, recursive functions are often useful. The following recursive function scans a document for text nodes containing a given string and returns true when it has found one:

function talksAbout(node, string) {
  if (node.nodeType == document.ELEMENT_NODE) {
    for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; i++) {
      if (talksAbout(node.childNodes[i], string))
        return true;
    }
    return false;
  } else if (node.nodeType == document.TEXT_NODE) {
    return node.nodeValue.indexOf(string) > -1;
  }
}

console.log(talksAbout(document.body, "book"));
// → true

The nodeValue property of a text node refers to the string of text that it represents.

Finding elements

Navigating these links among parents, children, and siblings is often useful, as in the previous function, which runs through the whole document. But if we want to find a specific node in the document, reaching it by starting at document.body and blindly following a hard-coded path of links is a bad idea. Doing so bakes assumptions into our program about the precise structure of the document—a structure we might want to change later. Another complicating factor is that text nodes are created even for the whitespace between nodes. The example document’s body tag does not have just three children (<h1> and two <p> elements) but actually has seven: those three, plus the spaces before, after, and between them.

So if we want to get the href attribute of the link in that document, we don’t want to say something like “Get the second child of the sixth child of the document body”. It’d be better if we could say “Get the first link in the document”. And we can.

var link = document.body.getElementsByTagName("a")[0];
console.log(link.href);

All element nodes have a getElementsByTagName method, which collects all elements with the given tag name that are descendants (direct or indirect children) of the given node and returns them as an array-like object.

To find a specific single node, you can give it an id attribute and use document.getElementById instead.

<p>My ostrich Gertrude:</p>
<p><img id="gertrude" src="img/ostrich.png"></p>

<script>
  var ostrich = document.getElementById("gertrude");
  console.log(ostrich.src);
</script>

A third, similar method is getElementsByClassName, which, like getElementsByTagName, searches through the contents of an element node and retrieves all elements that have the given string in their class attribute.

Changing the document

Almost everything about the DOM data structure can be changed. Element nodes have a number of methods that can be used to change their content. The removeChild method removes the given child node from the document. To add a child, we can use appendChild, which puts it at the end of the list of children, or insertBefore, which inserts the node given as the first argument before the node given as the second argument.

<p>One</p>
<p>Two</p>
<p>Three</p>

<script>
  var paragraphs = document.body.getElementsByTagName("p");
  document.body.insertBefore(paragraphs[2], paragraphs[0]);
</script>

A node can exist in the document in only one place. Thus, inserting paragraph “Three” in front of paragraph “One” will first remove it from the end of the document and then insert it at the front, resulting in “Three/One/Two”. All operations that insert a node somewhere will, as a side effect, cause it to be removed from its current position (if it has one).

The replaceChild method is used to replace a child node with another one. It takes as arguments two nodes: a new node and the node to be replaced. The replaced node must be a child of the element the method is called on. Note that both replaceChild and insertBefore expect the new node as their first argument.

Creating nodes

In the following example, we want to write a script that replaces all images (<img> tags) in the document with the text held in their alt attributes, which specifies an alternative textual representation of the image.

This involves not only removing the images but adding a new text node to replace them. For this, we use the document.createTextNode method.

<p>The <img src="img/cat.png" alt="Cat"> in the
  <img src="img/hat.png" alt="Hat">.</p>

<p><button onclick="replaceImages()">Replace</button></p>

<script>
  function replaceImages() {
    var images = document.body.getElementsByTagName("img");
    for (var i = images.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
      var image = images[i];
      if (image.alt) {
        var text = document.createTextNode(image.alt);
        image.parentNode.replaceChild(text, image);
      }
    }
  }
</script>

Given a string, createTextNode gives us a type 3 DOM node (a text node), which we can insert into the document to make it show up on the screen.

The loop that goes over the images starts at the end of the list of nodes. This is necessary because the node list returned by a method like getElementsByTagName (or a property like childNodes) is live. That is, it is updated as the document changes. If we started from the front, removing the first image would cause the list to lose its first element so that the second time the loop repeats, where i is 1, it would stop because the length of the collection is now also 1.

If you want a solid collection of nodes, as opposed to a live one, you can convert the collection to a real array by calling the array slice method on it.

var arrayish = {0: "one", 1: "two", length: 2};
var real = Array.prototype.slice.call(arrayish, 0);
real.forEach(function(elt) { console.log(elt); });
// → one
//   two

To create regular element nodes (type 1), you can use the document.createElement method. This method takes a tag name and returns a new empty node of the given type.

The following example defines a utility elt, which creates an element node and treats the rest of its arguments as children to that node. This function is then used to add a simple attribution to a quote.

<blockquote id="quote">
  No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn
  just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away
  from it.
</blockquote>

<script>
  function elt(type) {
    var node = document.createElement(type);
    for (var i = 1; i < arguments.length; i++) {
      var child = arguments[i];
      if (typeof child == "string")
        child = document.createTextNode(child);
      node.appendChild(child);
    }
    return node;
  }

  document.getElementById("quote").appendChild(
    elt("footer", "—",
        elt("strong", "Karl Popper"),
        ", preface to the second editon of ",
        elt("em", "The Open Society and Its Enemies"),
        ", 1950"));
</script>

Attributes

Some element attributes, such as href for links, can be accessed through a property of the same name on the element’s DOM object. This is the case for a limited set of commonly used standard attributes.

But HTML allows you to set any attribute you want on nodes. This can be useful because it allows you to store extra information in a document. If you make up your own attribute names, though, such attributes will not be present as a property on the element’s node. Instead, you’ll have to use the getAttribute and setAttribute methods to work with them.

<p data-classified="secret">The launch code is 00000000.</p>
<p data-classified="unclassified">I have two feet.</p>

<script>
  var paras = document.body.getElementsByTagName("p");
  Array.prototype.forEach.call(paras, function(para) {
    if (para.getAttribute("data-classified") == "secret")
      para.parentNode.removeChild(para);
  });
</script>

I recommended prefixing the names of such made-up attributes with data- to ensure they do not conflict with any other attributes.

As a simple example, we’ll write a “syntax highlighter” that looks for <pre> tags (“preformatted”, used for code and similar plaintext) with a data-language attribute and crudely tries to highlight the keywords for that language.

function highlightCode(node, keywords) {
  var text = node.textContent;
  node.textContent = ""; // Clear the node

  var match, pos = 0;
  while (match = keywords.exec(text)) {
    var before = text.slice(pos, match.index);
    node.appendChild(document.createTextNode(before));
    var strong = document.createElement("strong");
    strong.appendChild(document.createTextNode(match[0]));
    node.appendChild(strong);
    pos = keywords.lastIndex;
  }
  var after = text.slice(pos);
  node.appendChild(document.createTextNode(after));
}

The function highlightCode takes a <pre> node and a regular expression (with the “global” option turned on) that matches the keywords of the programming language that the element contains.

The textContent property is used to get all the text in the node and is then set to an empty string, which has the effect of emptying the node. We loop over all matches of the keyword expression, appending the text between them as regular text nodes, and the text matched (the keywords) as text nodes wrapped in <strong> (bold) elements.

We can automatically highlight all programs on the page by looping over all the <pre> elements that have a data-language attribute and calling highlightCode on each one with the correct regular expression for the language.

var languages = {
  javascript: /\b(function|return|var)\b/g /* … etc */
};

function highlightAllCode() {
  var pres = document.body.getElementsByTagName("pre");
  for (var i = 0; i < pres.length; i++) {
    var pre = pres[i];
    var lang = pre.getAttribute("data-language");
    if (languages.hasOwnProperty(lang))
      highlightCode(pre, languages[lang]);
  }
}

Here is an example:

<p>Here it is, the identity function:</p>
<pre data-language="javascript">
function id(x) { return x; }
</pre>

<script>highlightAllCode();</script>

There is one commonly used attribute, class, which is a reserved word in the JavaScript language. For historical reasons—some old JavaScript implementations could not handle property names that matched keywords or reserved words—the property used to access this attribute is called className. You can also access it under its real name, "class", by using the getAttribute and setAttribute methods.

Layout

You might have noticed that different types of elements are laid out differently. Some, such as paragraphs (<p>) or headings (<h1>), take up the whole width of the document and are rendered on separate lines. These are called block elements. Others, such as links (<a>) or the <strong> element used in the previous example, are rendered on the same line with their surrounding text. Such elements are called inline elements.

For any given document, browsers are able to compute a layout, which gives each element a size and position based on its type and content. This layout is then used to actually draw the document.

The size and position of an element can be accessed from JavaScript. The offsetWidth and offsetHeight properties give you the space the element takes up in pixels. A pixel is the basic unit of measurement in the browser and typically corresponds to the smallest dot that your screen can display. Similarly, clientWidth and clientHeight give you the size of the space inside the element, ignoring border width.

<p style="border: 3px solid red">
  I'm boxed in
</p>

<script>
  var para = document.body.getElementsByTagName("p")[0];
  console.log("clientHeight:", para.clientHeight);
  console.log("offsetHeight:", para.offsetHeight);
</script>

The most effective way to find the precise position of an element on the screen is the getBoundingClientRect method. It returns an object with top, bottom, left, and right properties, indicating the pixel positions of the sides of the element relative to the top left of the screen. If you want them relative to the whole document, you must add the current scroll position, found under the global pageXOffset and pageYOffset variables.

Laying out a document can be quite a lot of work. In the interest of speed, browser engines do not immediately re-layout a document every time it is changed but rather wait as long as they can. When a JavaScript program that changed the document finishes running, the browser will have to compute a new layout in order to display the changed document on the screen. When a program asks for the position or size of something by reading properties such as offsetHeight or calling getBoundingClientRect, providing correct information also requires computing a layout.

A program that repeatedly alternates between reading DOM layout information and changing the DOM forces a lot of layouts to happen and will consequently run really slowly. The following code shows an example of this. It contains two different programs that build up a line of X characters 2,000 pixels wide and measures the time each one takes.

<p><span id="one"></span></p>
<p><span id="two"></span></p>

<script>
  function time(name, action) {
    var start = Date.now(); // Current time in milliseconds
    action();
    console.log(name, "took", Date.now() - start, "ms");
  }

  time("naive", function() {
    var target = document.getElementById("one");
    while (target.offsetWidth < 2000)
      target.appendChild(document.createTextNode("X"));
  });
  // → naive took 32 ms

  time("clever", function() {
    var target = document.getElementById("two");
    target.appendChild(document.createTextNode("XXXXX"));
    var total = Math.ceil(2000 / (target.offsetWidth / 5));
    for (var i = 5; i < total; i++)
      target.appendChild(document.createTextNode("X"));
  });
  // → clever took 1 ms
</script>

Styling

We have seen that different HTML elements display different behavior. Some are displayed as blocks, others inline. Some add styling, such as <strong> making its content bold and <a> making it blue and underlining it.

The way an <img> tag shows an image or an <a> tag causes a link to be followed when it is clicked is strongly tied to the element type. But the default styling associated with an element, such as the text color or underline, can be changed by us. Here is an example using the style property:

<p><a href=".">Normal link</a></p>
<p><a href="." style="color: green">Green link</a></p>

A style attribute may contain one or more declarations, which are a property (such as color) followed by a colon and a value (such as green). When there is more than one declaration, they must be separated by semicolons, as in "color: red; border: none".

There are a lot of aspects that can be influenced by styling. For example, the display property controls whether an element is displayed as a block or an inline element.

This text is displayed <strong>inline</strong>,
<strong style="display: block">as a block</strong>, and
<strong style="display: none">not at all</strong>.

The block tag will end up on its own line since block elements are not displayed inline with the text around them. The last tag is not displayed at all—display: none prevents an element from showing up on the screen. This is a way to hide elements. It is often preferable to removing them from the document entirely because it makes it easy to reveal them again at a later time.

JavaScript code can directly manipulate the style of an element through the node’s style property. This property holds an object that has properties for all possible style properties. The values of these properties are strings, which we can write to in order to change a particular aspect of the element’s style.

<p id="para" style="color: purple">
  Pretty text
</p>

<script>
  var para = document.getElementById("para");
  console.log(para.style.color);
  para.style.color = "magenta";
</script>

Some style property names contain dashes, such as font-family. Because such property names are awkward to work with in JavaScript (you’d have to say style["font-family"]), the property names in the style object for such properties have their dashes removed and the letters that follow them capitalized (style.fontFamily).

Cascading styles

The styling system for HTML is called CSS for Cascading Style Sheets. A style sheet is a set of rules for how to style elements in a document. It can be given inside a <style> tag.

<style>
  strong {
    font-style: italic;
    color: gray;
  }
</style>
<p>Now <strong>strong text</strong> is italic and gray.</p>

The cascading in the name refers to the fact that multiple such rules are combined to produce the final style for an element. In the previous example, the default styling for <strong> tags, which gives them font-weight: bold, is overlaid by the rule in the <style> tag, which adds font-style and color.

When multiple rules define a value for the same property, the most recently read rule gets a higher precedence and wins. So if the rule in the <style> tag included font-weight: normal, conflicting with the default font-weight rule, the text would be normal, not bold. Styles in a style attribute applied directly to the node have the highest precedence and always win.

It is possible to target things other than tag names in CSS rules. A rule for .abc applies to all elements with "abc" in their class attributes. A rule for #xyz applies to the element with an id attribute of "xyz" (which should be unique within the document).

.subtle {
  color: gray;
  font-size: 80%;
}
#header {
  background: blue;
  color: white;
}
/* p elements, with classes a and b, and id main */
p.a.b#main {
  margin-bottom: 20px;
}

The precedence rule favoring the most recently defined rule holds true only when the rules have the same specificity. A rule’s specificity is a measure of how precisely it describes matching elements, determined by the number and kind (tag, class, or ID) of element aspects it requires. For example, a rule that targets p.a is more specific than rules that target p or just .a, and would thus take precedence over them.

The notation p > a {…} applies the given styles to all <a> tags that are direct children of <p> tags. Similarly, p a {…} applies to all <a> tags inside <p> tags, whether they are direct or indirect children.

Query selectors

We won’t be using style sheets all that much in this book. Although understanding them is crucial to programming in the browser, properly explaining all the properties they support and the interaction among those properties would take two or three books.

The main reason I introduced selector syntax—the notation used in style sheets to determine which elements a set of styles apply to—is that we can use this same mini-language as an effective way to find DOM elements.

The querySelectorAll method, which is defined both on the document object and on element nodes, takes a selector string and returns an array-like object containing all the elements that it matches.

<p>And if you go chasing
  <span class="animal">rabbits</span></p>
<p>And you know you're going to fall</p>
<p>Tell 'em a <span class="character">hookah smoking
  <span class="animal">caterpillar</span></span></p>
<p>Has given you the call</p>

<script>
  function count(selector) {
    return document.querySelectorAll(selector).length;
  }
  console.log(count("p"));           // All <p> elements
  // → 4
  console.log(count(".animal"));     // Class animal
  // → 2
  console.log(count("p .animal"));   // Animal inside of <p>
  // → 2
  console.log(count("p > .animal")); // Direct child of <p>
  // → 1
</script>

Unlike methods such as getElementsByTagName, the object returned by querySelectorAll is not live. It won’t change when you change the document.

The querySelector method (without the All part) works in a similar way. This one is useful if you want a specific, single element. It will return only the first matching element or null if no elements match.

Positioning and animating

The position style property influences layout in a powerful way. By default it has a value of static, meaning the element sits in its normal place in the document. When it is set to relative, the element still takes up space in the document, but now the top and left style properties can be used to move it relative to its normal place. When position is set to absolute, the element is removed from the normal document flow—that is, it no longer takes up space and may overlap with other elements. Also, its top and left properties can be used to absolutely position it relative to the top-left corner of the nearest enclosing element whose position property isn’t static, or relative to the document if no such enclosing element exists.

We can use this to create an animation. The following document displays a picture of a cat that floats around in an ellipse:

<p style="text-align: center">
  <img src="img/cat.png" style="position: relative">
</p>
<script>
  var cat = document.querySelector("img");
  var angle = 0, lastTime = null;
  function animate(time) {
    if (lastTime != null)
      angle += (time - lastTime) * 0.001;
    lastTime = time;
    cat.style.top = (Math.sin(angle) * 20) + "px";
    cat.style.left = (Math.cos(angle) * 200) + "px";
    requestAnimationFrame(animate);
  }
  requestAnimationFrame(animate);
</script>

The picture is centered on the page and given a position of relative. We’ll repeatedly update that picture’s top and left styles in order to move it.

The script uses requestAnimationFrame to schedule the animate function to run whenever the browser is ready to repaint the screen. The animate function itself again calls requestAnimationFrame to schedule the next update. When the browser window (or tab) is active, this will cause updates to happen at a rate of about 60 per second, which tends to produce a good-looking animation.

If we just updated the DOM in a loop, the page would freeze and nothing would show up on the screen. Browsers do not update their display while a JavaScript program is running, nor do they allow any interaction with the page. This is why we need requestAnimationFrame—it lets the browser know that we are done for now, and it can go ahead and do the things that browsers do, such as updating the screen and responding to user actions.

Our animation function is passed the current time as an argument, which it compares to the time it saw before (the lastTime variable) to ensure the motion of the cat per millisecond is stable, and the animation moves smoothly. If it just moved a fixed amount per step, the motion would stutter if, for example, another heavy task running on the same computer were to prevent the function from running for a fraction of a second.

Moving in circles is done using the trigonometry functions Math.cos and Math.sin. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these, I’ll briefly introduce them since we will occasionally need them in this book.

Math.cos and Math.sin are useful for finding points that lie on a circle around point (0,0) with a radius of one unit. Both functions interpret their argument as the position on this circle, with zero denoting the point on the far right of the circle, going clockwise until 2π (about 6.28) has taken us around the whole circle. Math.cos tells you the x-coordinate of the point that corresponds to the given position around the circle, while Math.sin yields the y-coordinate. Positions (or angles) greater than 2π or less than 0 are valid—the rotation repeats so that a+2π refers to the same angle as a.

Using cosine and sine to compute coordinates

The cat animation code keeps a counter, angle, for the current angle of the animation and increments it in proportion to the elapsed time every time the animate function is called. It can then use this angle to compute the current position of the image element. The top style is computed with Math.sin and multiplied by 20, which is the vertical radius of our circle. The left style is based on Math.cos and multiplied by 200 so that the circle is much wider than it is high, resulting in an elliptic motion.

Note that styles usually need units. In this case, we have to append "px" to the number to tell the browser we are counting in pixels (as opposed to centimeters, “ems”, or other units). This is easy to forget. Using numbers without units will result in your style being ignored—unless the number is 0, which always means the same thing, regardless of its unit.

Summary

JavaScript programs may inspect and interfere with the current document that a browser is displaying through a data structure called the DOM. This data structure represents the browser’s model of the document, and a JavaScript program can modify it to change the visible document.

The DOM is organized like a tree, in which elements are arranged hierarchically according to the structure of the document. The objects representing elements have properties such as parentNode and childNodes, which can be used to navigate through this tree.

The way a document is displayed can be influenced by styling, both by attaching styles to nodes directly and by defining rules that match certain nodes. There are many different style properties, such as color or display. JavaScript can manipulate an element’s style directly through its style property.

Exercises

Build a table

We built plaintext tables in Chapter 6. HTML makes laying out tables quite a bit easier. An HTML table is built with the following tag structure:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>name</th>
    <th>height</th>
    <th>country</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Kilimanjaro</td>
    <td>5895</td>
    <td>Tanzania</td>
  </tr>
</table>

For each row, the <table> tag contains a <tr> tag. Inside of these <tr> tags, we can put cell elements: either heading cells (<th>) or regular cells (<td>).

The same source data that was used in Chapter 6 is again available in the MOUNTAINS variable in the sandbox. It can also be downloaded from the website.

Write a function buildTable that, given an array of objects that all have the same set of properties, builds up a DOM structure representing a table. The table should have a header row with the property names wrapped in <th> elements and should have one subsequent row per object in the array, with its property values in <td> elements.

The Object.keys function, which returns an array containing the property names that an object has, will probably be helpful here.

Once you have the basics working, right-align cells containing numbers by setting their style.textAlign property to "right".

<style>
  /* Defines a cleaner look for tables */
  table  { border-collapse: collapse; }
  td, th { border: 1px solid black; padding: 3px 8px; }
  th     { text-align: left; }
</style>

<script>
  function buildTable(data) {
    // Your code here.
  }

  document.body.appendChild(buildTable(MOUNTAINS));
</script>

Use document.createElement to create new element nodes, document.createTextNode to create text nodes, and the appendChild method to put nodes into other nodes.

You should loop over the key names once to fill in the top row and then again for each object in the array to construct the data rows.

Don’t forget to return the enclosing <table> element at the end of the function.

Elements by tag name

The getElementsByTagName method returns all child elements with a given tag name. Implement your own version of it as a regular nonmethod function that takes a node and a string (the tag name) as arguments and returns an array containing all descendant element nodes with the given tag name.

To find the tag name of an element, use its tagName property. But note that this will return the tag name in all uppercase. Use the toLowerCase or toUpperCase string method to compensate for this.

<h1>Heading with a <span>span</span> element.</h1>
<p>A paragraph with <span>one</span>, <span>two</span>
  spans.</p>

<script>
  function byTagName(node, tagName) {
    // Your code here.
  }

  console.log(byTagName(document.body, "h1").length);
  // → 1
  console.log(byTagName(document.body, "span").length);
  // → 3
  var para = document.querySelector("p");
  console.log(byTagName(para, "span").length);
  // → 2
</script>

The solution is most easily expressed with a recursive function, similar to the talksAbout function defined earlier in this chapter.

You could call byTagname itself recursively, concatenating the resulting arrays to produce the output. For a more efficient approach, define an inner function that calls itself recursively and that has access to an array variable defined in the outer function to which it can add the matching elements it finds. Don’t forget to call the inner function once from the outer function.

The recursive function must check the node type. Here we are interested only in node type 1 (document.ELEMENT_NODE). For such nodes, we must loop over their children and, for each child, see whether the child matches the query while also doing a recursive call on it to inspect its own children.

The cat’s hat

Extend the cat animation defined earlier so that both the cat and his hat (<img src="img/hat.png">) orbit at opposite sides of the ellipse.

Or make the hat circle around the cat. Or alter the animation in some other interesting way.

To make positioning multiple objects easier, it is probably a good idea to switch to absolute positioning. This means that top and left are counted relative to the top left of the document. To avoid using negative coordinates, you can simply add a fixed number of pixels to the position values.

<img src="img/cat.png" id="cat" style="position: absolute">
<img src="img/hat.png" id="hat" style="position: absolute">

<script>
  var cat = document.querySelector("#cat");
  var hat = document.querySelector("#hat");
  // Your code here.
</script>

Capítulo 13The Document Object Model