Javascript access TR from TD

If you have the dom element in javascript, you can use .parentNode() which will give you the parent node, which should be the table row. Then you can set .className

td stands for table data..

now .. in your case you need the parentNode property of the td ..

<tr>
<td onclick="this.parentNode.setAttribute('class', 'newName')">My TD</td>
</tr>

or as bobince suggested in his comment

<td onclick="this.parentNode.className= 'newName'">My TD</td>

In jquery, it would be really simple if you have the reference to your td:

$(this).closest('tr');

If you really don't want to take a dependency on jQuery, then you could just do a loop getting the parentNode and checking it's type as a more general purpose solution. In this case you could just get the parentNode since tr is always a direct parent of td. You can do something like this (note this was not tested):

var parent = myTd.parentNode;
while(true) {
  if(parent == null) {
    return;
  }
  if(parent.nodeName === "TR") {
    return parent;
  }
  parent = parent.parentNode;
}