The Future and the Past

• What do we do about old browsers—ignore them? Leave their users in the dust?
• You're already forking the code; make it more efficient and maybe less branched
• Once you've made the leap to the W3C DOM, then you can have future-compatible code and still use your old code forks to handle old browsers
• Try using simple objects instead:

  function getThing(idname) {
    var thing = null;
    if (document.getElementById)
      thing = document.getElementById(idname);
    else if (document.all)
      thing = document.all[idname];
    else if (document.layers)
      thing = document.layers[idname];
    return thing;
  }