Careful when dealing with options in IE

If you have a drop down that looks like this:

<select name="name"
 onchange="alert(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)">
  <option>Bill</option>
  <option>Gates</option>
</select>

you'll get a different alert message in Firefox and IE6. Try it here

Firefox will understand that if you don't have a value attribute on a option tag, it takes the content of the option tag as the value. IE doesn't. On the above code it returns blank (aka. empty string) in the alert.

It's not been a problem until today for me but it's worth keeping in mind next time you need to read from a drop down with javascript. Ideally your javascript should do something like this:

var selectelement = document.forms[0].name;
var optionelements = selectelements.options;
var selected_option = optionelements[selectelement.selectedIndex];
var value;
if (selected_option.getAttribute('value')==null)
  value = selected_option.firstChild.nodeValue;
else
  value = selected_option.value;
alert(value);

...or something like that. But who can be asked? I just made sure my option tags always have a value attribute even though the XHTML 1.0 DTD does not require it.