JS Form Validation

Suppose that I use Rails to create an HTML form element. By that I mean that I have some Ruby code that I call from within <%= %> and the Ruby code then generates the form element for me. So what actually gets stuck into the code might look like this:

<input type="text" name="element1" />

It appears that if, on submission, I use JS to validate by checking to see if element1 is longer than 0 characters, it appears that JS thinks that element1 is undefined. Am I making some mistake; or, is that the expected result? If it is the expected result, anything I can do so as to be able to validate using JS?

Thanks.

       ... doug

You'll need an id="element1" in there for getElementById to work.