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Asked: 2026-05-12T18:39:57+00:00

This is rather interesting, I think. Consider following code, both the window.onload and body

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This is rather interesting, I think. Consider following code, both the window.onload and body onload=”” call the same function. However, the results are different. It appears to me that window.onload has a problem with collections. Here’s the code:

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">

    window.onload = getSpanElements();

    function getSpanElements(){
        var collectionBoolean = document.getElementsByTagName("span")?true:false;
        alert(
            "collection exists? " + collectionBoolean + "; number of collection members: " + document.getElementsByTagName("span").length
        );
    }


</script>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    <title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body onload="getSpanElements()">
    <span> test </span>
</body>

As you can see, both report that the collection exists, however window.onload reports that it has no members. Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re setting the function wrong:

    window.onload = getSpanElements();

    should be

    window.onload = getSpanElements;

    You’re setting the onload handler to the return value of getSpanElements() at the moment.

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