I’m working on a project that has compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 as a major requirement. This means all appearances, all Ajaxy functionality, every aspect of the web application should look and perform in IE6 just as it would in Firefox, Chrome, IE7, IE8, and Safari. One of my favorite pieces of code is "document.getElementById()" but special cases have to be considered for IE 6. As an example, you can use getElementById to change the value of a hidden form element:
<input type="hidden" id="foo" name="foo" value="default value">
<input type="submit" id="goBtn" name="goBtn" value="Process..." onclick="document.getElementById('foo')
That code will not always work. jQuery comes to the rescue! Rather than write lines and lines of additional code for browser testing and coding for a special case, we can simply replace "document.getElementById(‘foo’).value=’anothervalue’;" with "$(‘#foo’).val(‘anothervalue’);" and the code will work.
<input type="hidden" id="foo" name="foo" value="default value">
<input type="submit" id="goBtn" name="goBtn" value="Process..." onclick="$('#foo').val('anothervalue');">
I cannot sing jQuery’s praises enough!
