Hi Simon, Direct access will always be faster, here's how the methods work:
getElementById has to recurse through every child element (the approach of the recursion may vary from browser-to-browser) until it finds an element that matches the id and then it breaks out of the loop and returns the element. Directly accessing the elements using dot notation is less flexible because it will only work with a specific html structure, but there's no looping so it's a O(1) complexity algorithm (ie very fast), whereas the getElementById algorithm gets increasingly complex as the DOM gets more complicated. Hope this helps. Regards, Andrew Ingram > Hi, > > http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Using_Web_Standards_in_your_Web_Pages > states: > > "The best and most supported practice for getting scriptable access to > an element in an HTML page is to use document.getElementById(id). " > > A colleague of mine reckons such access will be much slower than > accessing the element directly. > > So which is faster? > > document.forms.myform.elements.field1 > > or > > document.getElementById(field1) > > > Cheers, > > Simon ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
