JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Name

HTMLDocument.all[]: all HTML elements in a document — IE 4

Synopsis

document.all[i]
document.all[name]
document.all.tags(tagname)

Description

all[] is a versatile array-like object that provides access to all the HTML elements in a document. The all[] array originated in IE 4 and has been adopted by a number of other browsers. It has been superseded by the standard getElementById( ) and getElementsByTagName( ) methods of the Document interface, and the standard getElementsByName( ) method of the HTMLDocument interface. Despite this, the all[] array is still used in existing code.

all[] contains the elements in source order, and you can extract them directly from the array if you know their exact numeric position within the array. It is more common, however, to use the all[] array to retrieve elements by the value of their name or id HTML attributes. If more than one element has the specified name, using that name as an index into all[] returns an array of elements that share the name.

all.tags( ) is passed a tag name and returns an array of HTML elements of the specified type.

See Also

Document.getElementById( ), Document.getElementsByTagName( ), HTMLElement