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Comment by circuit10 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I had never heard of that ID -> variable feature

Yeah it was hard to believe when I first learned about it, but it's true. I think I first found out when I forgot to put in a getElementById call and my code still worked.

More specifically it becomes a property of window, which is the global object.

So <div id="hello"> becomes accessible as window["hello"], which means you can just directly write hello.innerText = "Hi!".

Since this may conflicts with any of the hundreds of other properties on window, it's generally not something that should be used.

Historically it wasn't too uncommon to see it, but since it doesn't work well with typescript, it's very rare now.

You can make it work with typescript by declaring it as an HTMLElement without defining it.

Also window.document.forms gets you direct access to all forms, "name" automatically attach an attribute to the parents and "this" rebind to the current element on inline event handler.

The DOM API may have been very messy at creation, but it is also very handy and powerful, especially for binding to a live programming visual environment with instant remote update capabilities.

Speaking of forms: form.elements.username is my preferred way of accessing form fields. You can also use a field .form prop to access its connected form. This is fundamental when the field exists outside <form> ;)

You mean there is bidirectional binding between form.elements.username and the UI value? Why did we need React! HTML should have IFs and FOR loops…

It's been there since the beginning but it has several exceptions, like it's not available in strict mode and modules. Ask your ChatGPT if implied globals are right for you.

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