Crazy that people still try to solve this stuff by hand instead of leveraging a library like jQuery or Prototype. The Taconite plugin is my favourite way of dealing with this specific problem. http://malsup.com/jquery/taconite/
There're actually a few of us that are not able to use third-party libraries because of latency constraints...
A valid point. Out of curiosity, what environment do you develop for that uses IE6/7 and has latency constraints? Is it a network performance problem, or just the parse speed of the library?
It's mostly a number-of-users problem. When you have hundreds of millions of users, a few bytes add up.
Client-side network latency as well. A large number of our users are still on dialup.