I am experiencing weird behavior in IE8 which appears to be an IE bug but I am not sure. When accessing currentStyle field from an element it returns null. If I view its properties in the watch window I can see that it is defined and I can view its members. It appears that if I call attributes before hand then it will return the correct currentStyle. I was wondering if anyone has seen this behavior before and knows of some workarounds. This is happening when constructing the dojo grid. I also can not override this JavaScript behavior because it is buried deep in to an external Javascript library (dojo) and I do not have access to the function in the first place to override (function is defined in another functions scope).