Question

I know of two ways to find all the elements in the page.

document.getElementsByTagName('*') and document.all

Is there a better way or is one of these the best?

I’m making an element selector (mostly for practice) and I want to know the most reliable way to get all of the elements in the page, to test against the selector.

Answer 1

document.all is an outdated proprietary method from Microsoft. Don’t use it.

document.getElementsByTagName('*') is the W3C standard method of finding all the elements ina document – and surely the fastest – and works in Internet Explorer as well.

P.S. As someone is bound to chime in and provide a jQuery answer to this question, there’s how to select all elements in a page using jQuery: jQuery('*');

🙂