But that has very little to do with javascript. In javascript each element is defined as an javascript object, and that object usually have the same attributes as defined in the DTD but not always with the same name. And, most importantly: they have lots of more attributes and methods thats not defined in the DTD because it has nothing to do with the DTD. For example, the class attribute is named className in javascript.

A select element has a selectedIndex and that is not part of the DTD. Every standard property of an object is specified in the (DOM). It is in this standard that you have the specification for document.getElementByID for example, and everything else that has to do with how you access the document in javascript. Take a look at this and go down to Interface HTMLTextAreaElement. There you find: “attribute DOMString value;” and for its description: “Represents the current contents of the corresponding form control, in an interactive user agent. Changing this attribute changes the contents of the form control, but does not change the contents of the element.”

There’s no value attribute.

Afterwards, click back on the object which fires an ajax event. At one point I thought I was crazy so I alerted out both the value and the innerHTML of the textarea, and low and behold they were different. So for some reason, FF updates the innerHTML but fails to update the value of the textarea, which is the component it uses to render the text back out to the screen. As a work around, I set both the innerHTML and value fields of the textarea, which resolved my problem. Thanks for this blog posting, it would have driven me crazy!

The value is specified in the HTML-markup in different ways, but in javascript it is accessed via a property that has the same name regardless of how it was defined in the HTML-markup. The strange behavior you see with innerHTML on textarea is because of the autocomplete function: Load a page with input, select and textarea elements where each of them have a value.

Enter text in the input and textarea and choose something from the select box, then refresh the page with F5. Now it doesn’t matter what the server says the value of the fields should be, because the autocomplete feature in the browser has filled in the values you had before you pressed F5.