Does .previousSibling always return the parent's Text node first?

Question

I\'m stuck using native DOM methods (I know, right?) and I have a structure like this:

Answer 1

It returns the previous sibling node, it might be text node, it might be element node, it might be null

You can retrieve previous element nodes with .previousElementSibling which isn't supported in legacy browsers but you can use a function like:

function previousElementSibling( elem ) {

    do {

        elem = elem.previousSibling;

    } while ( elem && elem.nodeType !== 1 );

    return elem;
}

previousElementSibling(this) will result in the input element.