Is there an agreed set of "best practices" for use of the DOM Level 0 collections in modern JavaScript applications? (document.forms, document.images, etc.)
In applications using jQuery, I've noticed a tendency to, say, change the contents of a drop-down using $(...).html() to switch out the underlying nodes, rather than using element.options[]. Is this because the DOM 0 collections are best avoided, or because jQuery makes it much easier to change the underlying DOM structure?
Edit: I guess part of the question includes if the older features are reliable cross-browser. I remember that, once upon a time, IE would add <tbody> tags automatically to your table, while firefox would not. That made walking the dom tree painful cross-browser. Similarly, element.options[] had problems when changing the options in the collection. Are these guys reliable cross-browser?