Document.children

The read-only children property returns a live HTMLCollection which contains all of the child elements of the document upon which it was called.

For HTML documents, this is usually only the root <html> element.

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Syntax

// Getter
collection = document.children;

// No setter; read-only property

Return value

An HTMLCollection which is a live, ordered collection of the DOM elements which are children of the current document. You can access the individual child nodes in the collection by using either the item() method on the collection, or by using JavaScript array-style notation.

If the document has no element children, then children is an empty list with a length of 0.

Example

document.children;
// HTMLCollection [<html>]
// Usually only contains the root <html> element, the document's only direct child

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
children
29
16
25
No
16
9
≤37
29
25
16
9
2.0

See also

© 2005–2021 MDN contributors.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/children