jQuery traversing, which means "move through", are used to "find" (or select) HTML elements based on their relation to other elements. Start with one selection and move through that selection until you reach the elements you desire.
The image below illustrates an HTML page as a tree (DOM tree). With jQuery traversing, you can easily move up (ancestors), down (descendants) and sideways (siblings) in the tree, starting from the selected (current) element. This movement is called traversing - or moving through - the DOM tree.
<body>
<div class="container">
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p>This is a <em>simple paragraph</em>.</p>
<ul>
<li>Item One</li>
<li>Item Two</li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
Illustration explained:
jQuery provides a variety of methods that allow us to traverse the DOM.
The largest category of traversal methods are tree-traversal.
The next chapters will show us how to travel up, down and sideways in the DOM tree.