What is better, document.forms or getElementById?

[=?iso-8859-1?q?Marcos_Jos=E9_Setim?=]

Hi,

I would like to know if is better to use document.forms to detect forms
or getElementById.

Thanks

[Martin Honnen]

Marcos José Setim wrote:

I would like to know if is better to use document.forms to detect forms
or getElementById.

document.forms.formName or document.forms['formName'] has much better
support in older browsers, compared to
document.getElementById('formId'). On the other hand it depends on what
you want to do with your script, if you want to e.g. cloneNode,
removeChild, appendChild stuff in the form then document.forms might
access the form element object in older browsers while the remaining
functionality is not supported at all so you have no advantage using
document.forms.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Randy Webb]

Marcos José Setim said the following on 12/21/2006 10:32 AM:

Hi,

I would like to know if is better to use document.forms to detect forms
or getElementById.

First, you have to give a definition for "better".

Backwards compatibility: document.forms

Modernization: document.getElementById

Speed: That depends - directly - on two things:

1) The browser in use.
2) The HTML the browser is looking through.

--
Randy
Chance Favors The Prepared Mind
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/index.html
Javascript Best Practices - http://www.JavascriptToolbox.com/bestpractices/