One way to group elements in HTML is to assign them a name attribute. Multiple elements can share a name, then you can easily access them as an array using the getElementsByName() method.

The problem is that some DOM parsers aren't keen on, or are ignorant to, this use of the name attribute, so a simple object.name returns undefined. In my case, it was a DIV in Firefox 1.5 that was behaving this way.

There is a simple work around for this that works in Firefox, I haven't tested it in others. It is to use the getAttribute method that is an extension of any element object.

This ability can be useful if you have a function that performs a transformation on the active element, and another transformation on closely related elements.

Convert an irregular name=value pair string into a formatted array.