Document: documentElement 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 documentElement read-only property of the Document interface returns the Element that is the root element of the document (for example, the <html> element for HTML documents).

Value

A Element object.

Examples

js
const rootElement = document.documentElement;
const firstTier = rootElement.childNodes;
// firstTier is a NodeList of the direct children of the root element
// such as <head> and <body>

for (const child of firstTier) {
  // do something with each direct child of the root element
}

Notes

For any non-empty HTML document, documentElement will always be an <html> element. For any non-empty XML document, documentElement will always be whatever element is the root element of the document.

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-document-documentelement①

Browser compatibility