I'm not honestly sure when support for it was dropped; I know it fell out of favor at least 7 or 8 years ago. I can't quickly find a reference on the web to whe

I'm not honestly sure when support for it was dropped; I know it fell out of favor at least 7 or 8 years ago. I can't quickly find a reference on the web to when support for legacy DOM was dropped, either. For me, the third result for "javascript element value" is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1988614/how-to-get-hidden-element-value-in-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1988614/how-to-get-hidden...; the top result is a post full of techniques that work, but aren't what I'd use. How you'd get up to date depends a little on how far you want to go with Javascript. If you just want to be able to do basic stuff and then get on with your work, probably your best bet is to use jQuery and start with their tutorials (http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Getting_Started_with_jQuery http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Getting_Started_with_jQuery). jQuery does a nice job of abstracting away many of the annoying things about the DOM and the various browser quirks associated with it. If you wanted to really delve in to Javascript, I'm not really sure what to recommend. You would be throwing out most of the Netscape 4.0 way of doing things, and you'd eventually want to learn things like closures and Javascript's occasionally-annoying "everything is a global variable by default" and so on. One of the revered volumes would probably be best I guess: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74884/good-javascript-books http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74884/good-javascript-boo... I hear you on your frustration with it. Getting used to using the web inspector in Chrome or Firebug in Firefox helps, but error messages can be unhelpful, and you can find yourself swimming through lots of outdated (or incorrect, or even just "that's not how most people do things") blog posts when looking for answers. It's not quite like the good ol' days where you could drop in to a debugger and see the entire environment state and step through your code and so on. The mix of html and css and javascript also makes for this horrifically broad field of knowledge, most of which isn't really derivative, so it becomes a matter of trial-and-error and memorization.