What are HTML DOM #text elements?

"What are the "text" elements in text, tr, text? There is no text element that is a sibling of tr..."

Everything in the DOM is represented by a node. Including plain text.

In your case, the text nodes are coming from the whitespace you have around your elements for formatting. That text is counted just like any other text.

<table>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>foo</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

All that empty whitespace around the opening/closing tags gets represented as text nodes. This is true for all elements in the DOM, not just tables.

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Table elements have special collections for you to use, which allow you to access just the table elements.

table.tBodies[] // to get the tbody elements of a table

table.rows[]    // to get the rows of a table

tbody.rows[]    // to get the rows of a tbody

row.cells[]     // to get the cells of a row

Or you can use the generic .children to avoid text nodes.

tbody.children[]

The text nodes are the ones you write with "" inside your HTML.

Run this in your console, then scroll to the bottom, right-click and click inspect element:

document.body.appendChild(document.createTextNode("Some text node"))