Simon Willison’s Weblog

Don’t use document.all

11th August 2003

I’ve lost count of the number of Javascript scripts I’ve seen floating around that include the equivalent of the following code snippet:

if (document.all) {
   element = document.all[id];
else {
   element = document.getElementById(id);
}

document.all was introduced in Internet Explorer 4, because the W3C DOM hadn’t yet standardised a way of grabbing references to elements using their ID. By the time IE 5 came out, document.getElementById() had been standardised and as a result, IE 5 included support for it.

IE 5 was released in September 1998. A popular browser statistics site (insert usual disclaimer as to the reliability of any stats but your own here) show IE 4’s market share to be in the region of 1%. Even Netscape 4 has more users than that!

Don’t use document.all. document.getElementById() is supported by every Javascript supporting browser released since 1998.