javascript - Element accessible with ID

Question

I saw a strange behavior. I created a Input.

<input id='inputid' value='value'/>?

and tried to access it directly from id. Instead of throwing an exception console was showing above input element.

console.log(inputid);

After that I tried to compare it with getElementById

console.log( inputid == document.getElementById('inputid'));

console was showing true.

You can see this behavior on jsfiddle.

Is it a strange behavior or am I missing something?

I tested it in Chrome 23.0.1271.10 dev-m and firefox 15.0.1.

Answer 1

Back in the days of 4.0 browsers, Microsoft decided that it would be convenient to create, for every element with an id, a global variable with the same name as the id containing a reference to that element.

Support for this has appeared in some other browsers (in some rendering modes). This support is not universal so the feature should be avoided.