I'm not sure what this snippet has to do with Ajax, but it should be useful to some JavaScript beginners.

Well, sure it's just POJ, but he uses it in his AJAX [applications] - so it's got SOMETHING to do with AJAX

Why don't we do like this,
document.getElementById('youselectboxid').value
this will also return the value of the select box's value

Regards,
Kumar S
GuyFromChennai.com

Just getting the value wasn't enough: I needed to have it return a non-null value regardless of what selectId was passed in. If I call the function and nothing is selected, it will return a zero. If I call the function with an invalid selectId value, the function still returns a zero. It's not much, but as a Database guy, I'm always watchful of null evaulation.