What's the difference between an element and a node in XML?

The Node object is the primary data type for the entire DOM.

A node can be an element node, an attribute node, a text node, or any other of the node types explained in the "Node types" chapter.

An XML element is everything from (including) the element's start tag to (including) the element's end tag.

Different W3C specifications define different sets of "Node" types.

Thus, the DOM spec defines the following types of nodes:

• Document -- Element (maximum of one), ProcessingInstruction, Comment, DocumentType
• DocumentFragment -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
• DocumentType -- no children
• EntityReference -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
• Element -- Element, Text, Comment, ProcessingInstruction, CDATASection, EntityReference
• Attr -- Text, EntityReference
• ProcessingInstruction -- no children
• Comment -- no children
• Text -- no children
• CDATASection -- no children
• Entity -- Element, ProcessingInstruction, Comment, Text, CDATASection, EntityReference
• Notation -- no children

The XML Infoset (used by XPath) has a smaller set of nodes:

XPath has the following Node types:

• root nodes
• element nodes
• text nodes
• attribute nodes
• namespace nodes
• processing instruction nodes
• comment nodes

The answer to your question "What is the difference between an element and a node" is:

An element is a type of node. Many other types of nodes exist and serve different purposes.

A Node is a part of the DOM tree, an Element is a particular type of Node

e.g. <foo> This is Text </foo>

You have a foo Element, (which is also a Node, as Element inherits from Node) and a Text Node 'This is Text', that is a child of the foo Element/Node

A node can be a number of different kinds of things: some text, a comment, an element, an entity, etc. An element is a particular kind of node.

As described in the various XML specifications, an element is that which consists of a start tag, and end tag, and the content in between, or alternately an empty element tag (which has no content or end tag). In other words, these are all elements:

<foo> stuff </foo>
<foo bar="baz"></foo>
<foo baz="qux" />

Though you hear "node" used with roughly the same meaning, it has no precise definition per XML specs. It's usually used to refer to nodes of things like DOMs, which may be closely related to XML or use XML for their representation.

A node is the base class for both elements and attributes (and basically all other XML representations too).

Element is the only kind of node that can have child nodes and attributes.

Document also has child nodes, BUT
no attributes, no text, exactly one child element.

Now i know ,the element is one of node

All node types in here"http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_nodetype.asp"

Element is between the start tag and end in the end tag

So text node is a node , but not a element.

An element is a type of node as are attributes, text etc.