How about something like this? beware though, as it recursively parses the entire DOM tree, so it could cause considerable overhead on large or deeply nested pages document.getElementsByName = function(name){ var out = []; function getElementsByNameDelegate(elem, eName, results){ if(elem.name && elem.name == eName) results.push(elem); for(var i=0; i

elem.childNodes.length;i++) getElementsByNameDelegate(elem.childNodes, eName, results); } getElementsByNameDelegate(document, name, out); return out; } a beter solution might be to make the method iterative instead of recursive. Please note this method does not work for HTML elements that don't support the name attribute such as div's and span's (at least it didn't in FF 3 when i tested this). Another use for this might be to create a getElementsByClassName function to search for elements using a certain css class (just change .name to .className)

My bad for the strange markup.. first comment i ever posted here, didn't know how it was going to turn out..