Today I stumbled upon the possibility to access a DOM element in Javascript simply by its id e.g. like this:
elementid.style.backgroundColor = "blue"
I tested with a very short snippet if this works in IE, Firefox and Chrome - and it does. Here is the snippet I used:
<html><head>
<script>
function highlight() {
content.style.backgroundColor = "blue";
content.style.color = "white";
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">test content</div>
<div onclick="highlight()">highlight content</div>
</body></html>
So I wondered in which cases document.getElementById('elementid') should be used (or similar framework replacements like $()) and what are the drawbacks of the direct access.
I was not able to find any useful documentation on this. Everywhere either getElementById or framework methods are used.