Why this javscript is producing different output in FF and IE?

Question

Please see this:
http://jsbin.com/igeqa

here, i am simply using

alert ( tableObj.childNodes.length );

and in FF the output is 5 , while in IE it is 2. Please tell me what is causing this behaviour?

Answer 1

Firefox counts whitespace text nodes, while IE is just counting elements. So Firefox is returning [#text, THEAD, #text, TBODY, #text], while IE is returning just [THEAD, TBODY].

Answer 2

IE and Moz count the childNodes in a HTML document in different ways. Moz counts every empty space (possible textNodes) as a childNode, while IE counts only some of them. There are several solutions for that.