[Javascript] Something better than getElementById

[Paul Novitski]

At 05:08 PM 10/21/2005, Terry Riegel wrote:
>The only reason I need to getElementById is to set the background
>color to indicate the link is selected. Is there a way to set an
>attribute without looking up the id? I am looking for ways to speed
>up my pages, some have hundred's of ID's.

Terry,

You can pass references to the objects themselves instead of their ids:

         <tag onclick="doSomething(this);">
...
         function doSomething(argObject)
         {
                 argObject.className = "selected";
         }

If you prefer to avoid inline scripting, as I do, you can accomplish 
the same thing this way:

         function Initialize()
         {
                 ...
                 oObject.onclick = doSomething;
         }

         function doSomething(evt)
         {
                 // cancel event-bubbling
                         if (evt) { event = evt; }
                 event.cancelBubble = true;

                 // change class
                 this.className = "selected";
         }

Peter-Paul Koch has some good tutorials on event processing in 
javascript at http://www.quirksmode.org/

Regards,
Paul