You should node that in MSIE, the Collection object has an Item() method whereas DOM mandates that a NodeList should have an item() method. Note the difference in the case of the initial letter.

Even though an implementation may forgive an upper-lower case error when it parses the script source text, an item() call on NodeList can only return a Node object referenced using an integer index location within the collection.

Because the NodeList is based on an Array, NodeList.item(anIndex) is functionally equivalent to NodeList[anIndex] and one can enumerate through the set of Node objects using either technique.