Document: children property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The read-only children property returns a live HTMLCollection which contains all of the child elements of the document upon which it was called.

For HTML documents, this is usually only the root <html> element.

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Value

An HTMLCollection which is a live, ordered collection of the DOM elements which are children of the current document. You can access the individual child nodes in the collection by using either the item() method on the collection, or by using JavaScript array-style notation.

If the document has no element children, then children is an empty list with a length of 0.

Examples

js
document.children;
// HTMLCollection [<html>]
// Usually only contains the root <html> element, the document's only direct child

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-parentnode-children①

Browser compatibility

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See also