How do I remove specific child elements within an element of known ID?
<p>I would like to be able to determine if a parent node, whose ID I know, has direct child  nodes, and if such nodes are detected, remove them.  The  nodes, if they exist, will always follow some text, so I don't think I can use firstChild or lastChild.</p>

<p>Ideally, I would use Javascript to minimize the performance hit.  Although JQuery would also work if necessary.</p>

<p>The code is like this:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;a id="anchorID"&gt;some text 
&lt;span class="spanClass"&gt;some span text&lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/a&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Any help, as always, is appreciated.</p>
