Inconsistent Whitespace Text Nodes in Internet Explorer

Question

The following source code alerts the following results:

Internet Explorer 7: 29
Firefox 3.0.3: 37 (correct)
Safari

Answer 1

IE tries to be helpful and hides text nodes that contain only whitespace.

In the following:

W3C DOM spec says that

has 3 child nodes ("\n", and "\n"), IE will pretend there's only one.

The solution is to skip text nodes in all browsers:

var node = element.firstChild;
while(node && node.nodeType == 3) node = node.nextSibling;

Popular JS frameworks have functions for such things.