I'm actually not sure. How often do authors want to get the third child without knowing anything more about it than that it's an element? Iterating through the kids (by means of ET or '.childNodes') gives you much more context information (what type of element it is, what it's bbox is, whether or not it has text/child content, etc.). Not trying to be a pain, but can you identify a concrete use case?
[admin: please Cc me, I am not following this mailing-list] I probably has to use it in my daily code - find the n-th child element of another given element - at least a dozen times in the last fifteen days. Iterating through the kids is a for my point of view pure bloat compared to myFooElement.childElements.item(3)... </Daniel>
