Selecting the first H1

Published: Tuesday, Nov 4, 2008 Last modified: Monday, Dec 9, 2024

DOM manipulation in Javascript sucks:

var h1 = document.getElementsByTagName("h1");
h1.item(0).childNodes.item(0).nodeValue = "Hello World";

or (thank to Xiven):

document.getElementsByTagName("h1")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue

Using CSS selector style (better imo):

$('h1:first').text("Hello World");

or

$('h1:eq(0)').text("Hello World");

One wonders why it isn’t as easy as getElementsByTagName("h1")[0].text("Hello World")?