I was under the impression that in order to get the value from <select> you essentially had to do this:

var sel = document.getElementById("my-select");
var val = sel.options[sel.selectedIndex].value;

But I ran into some code today that simply does document.getElementById('my-select').value, which seems to work perfectly fine in Chrome and Firefox.

Has this changed recently, or has it always been this way? How far back is this supported?