The value
property only exists for form elements. If you want to get the content of any other elements, you can either use innerHTML [MDN] to get the content as HTML string, or textContent [MDN] resp. innerText [MSDN] to only get the text content without HTML tags.
childNodes [MDN] returns all child nodes, not only element nodes. That means, it also contains text nodes for example. The line break you have after <div id="parent">
is a text node as well. Hence, parent.childNodes[0]
returns the text node which consists only of a line break.
If you want to get the first element node, you can either use children [MDN] (see browser compatibility), or iterate over the child nodes, testing what kind of node each of them is. 1
indicates an element node, 3
a text node:
var child = parent.firstChild;
while(child && child.nodeType !== 1) {
child = child.nextSibling;
}
There are also other ways to retrieve elements, e.g. with getElementsByTagName [MDN].
Or in your case, you can just use getElementById [MDN] to get a reference to both of the elements.