Element accessible with ID

Question

I saw a strange behavior. I created a Input.

​

and tried to access it directly fr

Answer 1

To just expand a little on this situation based on a curiosity:

Will alert "world". However, with //var overWrite = "world"; (as in with that line commented out), it will alert the [html element]. Note that this is after the page loads so it is persistent and not some sort of temporary assignment.

Strongly agree that it should not be used due to inconsistency and readability issues.

EDIT

Still was curious about this issue and did some more testing. I was curious if access was faster with document.getElementById or by variable reference. Made this test:

html

js

var startTime = Date.now();
for( var i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
    for( var n = 0; n < 2000; n++){
        var ni = document.getElementById("contentZone");
    }
}
var endTime = Date.now();
console.log( endTime - startTime );

var aTime = Date.now();
for( var i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
    for( var n = 0; n < 2000; n++){
        var ni = contentZone;
    }
}
var bTime = Date.now();
console.log( bTime - aTime );

console

431
814

Tested on this machine only, but it would seem that using document.getElementById is still faster making this variable access even less desirable.