You have to use cells array, not DOM children to select table cells

Recently, I wanted to use DOM property firstChild to select the first cell in a TABLE row ... and got quite unexpected results, the firstChild in my case was a text node. Once I've warmed up my grey cells, it all became quite obvious. For example, in the following HTML markup ...

<table>
  <tr id='test'>
    <td>Cell #1</td>
    <td>Cell #2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

... the first child of the TR element is the whitespace between the TR tag and the first TD tag. As the whitespace is allowed in that position by the HTML standard, you cannot rely on the TR.firstChild property. You should use TR.cells[0] to select the first cell.