The children of an element node come from the children and children - comments properties. The attributes of an element node come from the attributes property. By an official resolution, this difference should be made clear. The root node has exactly one element child, which is called the document node, since it corresponds to the document element of XML 1.0. Some types of nodes may have child nodes of various types, and others are leaf nodes that cannot have anything below them in the document structure.
Some nodes also implement other, more specialized interfaces.
An element node may have child nodes of various types that represent content, attributes, and namespace declarations. For XML Schema, there would be significant simplifications in terminology.