The Node object is the basic datatype of the whole Document Object Model, and represents a single node in the document tree. Note that not all node types may have children even though methods to deal with them are available. For a list of all node types and any child node types they may have, see the DOM Structure Model.

Node Types
Below is a list of the valid node types and their enumeration. It is this number that is returned by the nodeType property.

• NODE_ELEMENT(1)
  This node represents an element.
• NODE_ATTRIBUTE(2)
  This node represents an attribute of an element. Note that it is not considered a child of the element node.
• NODE_TEXT(3)
  This node represents the text content of a tag.
• NODE_CDATA_SECTION(4)
  This node represents the CDATA section of the XML source. CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text that would otherwise be considered as markup.
• NODE_ENTITY_REFERENCE(5)
  This node represents a reference to an entity in the XML document.
• NODE_ENTITY(6)
  This node represents an expanded entity.
• NODE_PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION(7)
  This node represents a processing instruction from the XML document.
• NODE_COMMENT(8)
  This node represents a comment in the XML document.
• NODE_DOCUMENT(9)
  This node represents an XML document object.
• NODE_DOCUMENT_TYPE(10)
  This node represents the document type declaration of the <!DOCTYPE> tag.
• NODE_DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT(11)
  This node represents a document fragment. This associates a node or subtree with a document without actually being part of it.
• NODE_NOTATION(12)
  This node represents a notation in the document type declaration.

The values of nodeName and nodeValue vary according to the type of node. These values are detailed in the table below.

Microsoft's XMLDOMNode object extends the core XML DOM node interface with support for data types, namespaces, DTDs, and schemas. To demonstrate how it might be used we shall use a simple XML document called 'states.xml' which looks like this:

<States>
   <State ref="FL">
      <name>Florida</name>
      <capital>Tallahassee</capital>
   </State>
   <State ref="IA">
      <name>Iowa</name>
      <capital>Des Moines</capital>
   </State>
</States>

We will now load the XML file and create a Node object called 'current_node' out of the first child node of the root (i.e. the first State). Then we will write the xml for that node to the HTML file.

Code (JavaScript):
var xml_doc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xml_doc.async = false;
xml_doc.load("states.xml");

var current_node = xml_doc.documentElement.childNodes.item(0)
document.write(current_node.xml);

Output:
Florida Tallahassee