I'll blame @Osmose for that. The original script was finding elements relative to the form select using siblings(), which is great if you have multiple widgets on a page. Once I added more markup around some of the pieces, trying to find a direct sibling no longer worked and I would have needed to jump through more hoops to find the right relative node. But since in this case it really is a unique singleton (and presumably always will be) a plain old ID just seems simplest, and stashing it in a var is better.