A descendant is a child, grandchild, great-grandchild, and so on.
With jQuery you can traverse down the DOM tree to find descendants of an element.
Two useful jQuery methods for traversing down the DOM tree are:
The children() method returns all direct children of the selected element.
This method only traverse a single level down the DOM tree.
The following example returns all elements that are direct children of each <div> elements:
You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for children.
The following example returns all <p> elements with the class name "1", that are direct children of <div>:
The find() method returns descendant elements of the selected element, all the way down to the last descendant.
The following example returns all <span> elements that are descendants of <div>:
The following example returns all descendants of <div>:
For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.