After hours of debugging, it appears to me that in FireFox, the innerHTML of a DOM reflects what is actually in the markup, but in IE, the innerHTML reflects what\'s in the
using a good library is a great way to get around browser inconsistencies, and jquery is the one that I typically recommend - and if you're running into issues altering the elements in a form in particular, jquery boasts a few really useful plugins focused specifically on form manipulation and evaluation.