removechild

Does removeChild function really delete the child node completely? Or it just removes the element being child of the specified parant node? If it doesn't really deletes the element, is there a way to delete the element completely? The removeChild method simply removes it from its parent. If it’s a visible element of the page, it will be removed from the page. But Javascript has garbage collection. This means that the node object itself will remain in existence as long as any variable refers to it. So you can assign a node to a variable, use removeChild to 'prune' it from its parent node, and

After answering this question I am left wondering why removeChild needs a parent element. After all, we could simply do node.parentNode.removeChild(node); As the parent node should be always directly available to the Javascript/DOM engine, it is not strictly necessary to supply the parent node of the node that is to be removed. Of course I understand the principle that removeChild is a method of a DOM node, but why doesn't something like document.removeNode exist (that merely accepts an arbitrary node as parameter)? EDIT: To be more clear, the question is: why does the JS engine need the

Is it possible to remove a dom element that has no parent other than the body tag? I know this would be easy with a framework like jquery, but I'm trying to stick to straight javascript. Here's the code I've found to do it otherwise: function removeElement(parentDiv, childDiv){ if (childDiv == parentDiv) { alert("The parent div cannot be removed."); } else if (document.getElementById(childDiv)) { var child = document.getElementById(childDiv); var parent = document.getElementById(parentDiv); parent.removeChild(child); } else { alert("Child div has already been removed or does not exist.");

This is either very simple or impossible. I know I can do this: var element = document.getElementById('some_element'); element.parentNode.removeChild(element); ...but it feels messy. Is there a tidier - and universally supported - way to do the same thing? It's seems - to me at least - like there should be something like this: document.getElementById('some_element').remove(); ...but that doesn't work, and searching Google/SO has not yielded any alternative. I know it doesn't matter that much, but parentNode.removeChild() just feels hacky/messy/inefficient/bad practice-y. James It can seem a