document all vs document getElementById

Question

When should you use document all vs  document getElementById

User · Answer

Specifically  document all was introduced for IE4 BEFORE document getElementById had been introduced    So  the presence of document all means that the code is intended to support IE4  or is trying to identify the browser as IE4  though it could have been Opera   or the person who wrote  or copied and pasted  the code wasn t up on the latest   In the highly unlikely event that you need to support IE4  then  you do need document all  or a library that handles these ancient IE specs

User · Answer

Actually  document all is only minimally comparable to document getElementById   You wouldn t use one in place of the other  they don t return the same things   If you were trying to filter through browser capabilities you could use them as in Marcel Korpel s answer like this     if document getElementById      DOM     element   document getElementById id     else if  document all         IE     element   document all id     else if  document layers      Netscape  lt  6     element   document layers id        But  functionally  document getElementsByTagName      is more equivalent to document all   For example  if you were actually going to use document all to examine all the elements on a page  like this   var j   document all length  for var i   0  i  lt  j  i        alert  Page element   i    has tagName   document all i  tagName       you would use document getElementsByTagName      instead   var k   document getElementsByTagName       var j   k length   for  var i   0  i  lt  j  i         alert  Page element   i    has tagName   k i  tagName

User · Answer

document all is very old  you don t have to use it anymore   To quote Nicholas Zakas      For instance  when the DOM was young    not all browsers supported   getElementById    and so there was a   lot of code that looked like this    if document getElementById      DOM     element   document getElementById id     else if  document all       IE     element   document all id     else if  document layers      Netscape  lt  6     element   document layers id

User · Answer

document all works in Chrome now  not sure when since   but I ve been missing it the last 20 years     Simply a shorter method name than the clunky document getElementById  Not sure if it works in Firefox  those guys never had any desire to be compatible with the existing web  always creating new standards instead of embracing the existing web

User · Answer

document all   is a non-standard way of accessing DOM elements  It s been deprecated from a few browsers  It gives you access to all sub elements on your document   document getElementById   is a standard and fully supported  Each element have a unique id on the document   If you have    lt div id  testing  gt  lt  div gt    Using   document getElementById  testing       Will have access to that specific div

User · Answer

According to Microsoft s archived Internet Explorer Dev Center  document all is deprecated in IE 11 and Edge

User · Answer

document querySelectorAll  and its document querySelector   variant that returns the first found element  is much  much more powerful  You can easily    get an entire collection with document querySelectorAll       effectively emulating non-standard document all property  use document querySelector   your-id    effectively emulating document getElementById   function  use document querySelectorAll   your-class    effectively emulating document getElementsByClassName   function  use document querySelectorAll  form   instead of document forms  and document querySelectorAll  a   instead of document links  and perform any much more complex DOM querying  using any available CSS selector  that just cannot be covered with other document builtins    Unified querying API is the way to go  Even if document all would be in the standard  it s just inconvenient

User · Answer

document all is a proprietary Microsoft extension to the W3C standard     getElementById   is standard - use that   However  consider if using a js library like jQuery would come in handy   For example      id   is the jQuery equivalent for getElementById     Plus  you can use more than just CSS3 selectors

[javascript] document.all vs. document.getElementById

Examples related to javascript

Examples related to getelementbyid