I always thought there was a better way to access the dom. This is a tool that allows you to use extremely simple syntax to access dom elements. It makes an object with the name of your choice (I chose "$") that contains a reference to all elements that have an id.
example:
<script> $.foo.innerHTML = "Hello world" </script>
You can even choose to use an object that already exists (I chose "document" because it makes sense)
document.foo.innerHTML = "Hello world"
If you want to live dangerously, you can even make everything global!
foo.innerHTML = "Hello world"
You could replace "window" with "this", shortening this function even further. All this reminds me a bit of document.all, another rather stupid idea from Microsoft (not that they hadn't got a few good ones, like innerHTML).