Question

I read here that “self Refers to the current window or form“.

Self does not seem to refer to the current form in this case:

<form><input type="text" onkeyup="alert(self.foo.value)" name="foo"></form>

However in this case it works (referring to the window):

<form><input type="text" onkeyup="alert(self.document.forms[0].foo.value)" name="foo"></form>

So when would you use the self DOM property over just window?

Answer 1

For all windows, the self and window
properties of a window object are
synonyms for the current window, and
you can optionally use them to refer
to the current window. For example,
you can close the current window by
calling the close method of either
window or self. You can use these
properties to make your code more
readable or to disambiguate the
property reference self.status from a
form called status.