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

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
documentElement

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support