My goal is to locate the element that is positioned directly above another element in the layout. This could mean the element is nested within several levels of the DOM structure, or it may involve moving up a few levels in the hierarchy. For instance:
div.a
div.b
div.c
div.d
div.e
div.f
div.g
div.h
div.i
div.j
div.k
In this example, .b, .h, .i
are immediate children of .a
. So if I were to call getBefore($('.h'));
, I would expect to receive .g
. To achieve this, a pre-order reverse search would need to start at div.b
.
The issue I'm encountering is that without a complete global recursive scan, it becomes challenging to handle situations like getBefore($('.c'));
, where the expected result would be .b
. The routine, without knowledge of the complete hierarchy, may mistakenly retrieve the bottom-most element .g
after examining .b
.
Considering this, it appears that a recursive implementation may not be a straightforward solution, as the routine does not receive the root node as input, but rather a node within a tree of unknown structure. In light of this, what would be a reasonable iterative approach? The DOM provides mechanisms to navigate to parent nodes, access previous siblings, and retrieve a list of child nodes for any given element.