document.all vs. document.getElementById

Question

When should you use document.all vs. document.getElementById

What is your answer?

Answer 1

document.all is a proprietary Microsoft extension to the W3C-standard. getElementById is standard - use that.

Evaluate if using a js library like jquery would come in handy :)

$("#id") is the jquery equivalent for getElementById. PLUS, you can use more than even only css3 selectors.

edit: w3c

Answer 2

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 < 6
    element = document.layers[id];
}

Answer 3

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:

<div id="testing"></div>

Using

document.getElementById("testing"); 

Will have access to that specific div.