The DOM HTMLFormElement Interface Should Have a getElementsByName() Method

While useful on the HTMLDocument interface, getElementsByName() would be much more useful if it was included in HTMLFormElement interface. Every time I want to look up elements by their names, it’s usually on form elements rather than the document as a whole. Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s ever been a time I wanted to look elements up by name on the document, whereas I’ve wanted to do it on forms quite a bit. What a pain.

Oh, and here’s some code to get the same effect.

function getElementsByName(frm, name) {
    var elements = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < frm.elements.length; i++) {
        if (frm.elements[i].name == name) {
            elements[elements.length] = frm.elements[i];
        }
    }
    return elements;
}

It’s trivial, but hey!

Update: It’d be enough to use form.elements[name], so this is mostly redundant. The downside of using this method is that, at least in 2005, it didn’t include element added to the form dynamically.