node
DOM element.
Description
When working with the DOM, as is typical in a web-browser using JavaScript(!), you will often assign DOM elements to a variable - we define this as a node for ease of reference. For example:
var node = document.getElementById('example');
Technically this is an object primitive, but defining such objects as a node allows the documentation to be much more succinct.
Use in DataTables
Where a parameter is shown as accepting a node type, or a method returning a node type, it indicates that an object is expect / returned which refers to a DOM element.