======How to target a single element without getElementById?======

The UWA environment disables the ''document'' and ''window'' object for security and portability purposes, but retains some of their methods and events in its ''widget'' object (see " [[:uwa_specification:using_javascript_and_ajax#the_widget_object|using JavaScript and Ajax]]").

''getElementById'', while very useful in itself, has not been kept in ''widget'' because there can be multiple instances of a given widget, and thus multiple elements with the same id.

However, ''widget'' had both ''getElementsByTagName'' and ''getElementsByClassName'' methods, which can both be used to achieve the same result as getElementById would, if they are applied to ''widget.body'', which references the widget's XHTML tags.

''widget.body.getElementsByTagName'' and ''widget.body.getElementsByClassName'' each return an Array of elements, which is not directly usable unless you use a loop. You can use these methods as you would use ''getElementById'' by having only one element feature a given class, for instance, and targetting it as the first item from the ''getElementsByClassName'' array:

<code javascript>
var statusZone = widget.body.getElementsByClassName("statuszone")[0];
</code>

It's even cleaner when the targetted element is the only one using a tag name - because you don't have to assign a dummy class to an element just in order to target it:

<code javascript>
var textarea = widget.body.getElementsByTagName("textarea")[0];
</code>

The ''getElemtentsBy*'' method are not the only ways. If you dynamically generate your XHTML tags using JavaScript, you can directly obtain a reference for the element using the ''createElement'' method - reference which can the be used to target said new element:

<code javascript>
var myElement = widget.body.createElement;
</code>