Little Painful Javascript Quirk

Why doesn’t document.getElementById(’location’).value work as function parameter in Javascript?

What does work is:

var temp = document.getElementById(’location’);
temp.value works fine as function parameter.

Apparently javascript doesn’t like referencing fields directly on functions as in getElementById(’location’).value as a function parameter. IMHO this is implementation defect.

I hit against it once in a while and then I forget all about it. This time I am documenting it for posterity