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 GitHubdesktop | mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
documentElement |
Legend
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- Full support
- Full support
The compatibility table on this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.