3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204#syntax'>character data in XML) of an
Element
or
Attr
. If there is no markup inside an element's content, the text is contained in a single object implementing the
Text
interface that is the only child of the element. If there is markup, it is parsed into the information items (elements, comments, etc.) and
Text
nodes that form the list of children of the element.
When a document is first made available via the DOM, there is only one Text
node for each block of text. Users may create adjacent Text
nodes that represent the contents of a given element without any intervening markup, but should be aware that there is no way to represent the separations between these nodes in XML or HTML, so they will not (in general) persist between DOM editing sessions. The Node.normalize()
method merges any such adjacent Text
objects into a single node for each block of text.
No lexical check is done on the content of a Text
node and, depending on its position in the document, some characters must be escaped during serialization using character references; e.g. the characters "<&" if the textual content is part of an element or of an attribute, the character sequence "]]>" when part of an element, the quotation mark character " or the apostrophe character ' when part of an attribute.
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.