PROPRIETARY EXTENSIONS
Although all browser vendors understand the importance of adherence to standards, they all have a history of adding proprietary extensions to the DOM in order to fill perceived gaps in functionality. Though this may seem like a bad thing on the surface, proprietary extensions have given the web development community many important features that were later codified into standards such as HTML5.
There are still a large amount of DOM extensions that are proprietary in nature and haven't been incorporated into standards. This doesn't mean that they won't later be adopted as standards—just that at the time of this writing, they remain proprietary and adopted by only a subset of browsers.
The children Property
The differences in how Internet Explorer prior to version 9 and other browsers interpret white space in text nodes led to the creation of the children property. The children property is an HTMLCollection that contains only an element&apos...
