Merry Christmas!
Yea, I know. You're all gonna kill me for this one (especially if you're using an LCD monitor), so I'll keep it short. I'm probably off partying somewhere, so you should be too.
Did I mention that browser DOM models suck? Mozilla treats everything as an element all the time, which makes sense. Safari does as a list of nodes, but only if you don't have any paragraph tags in there and you reference it as a list. IE is better than Safari sometimes and worse in others. I need to go read the spec to be sure what they're supposed to be doing, but the Moz way definitely makes the most sense to me (and follows the pure XML models I've used).
oww... and yeah, Safari likes to chop off the first two letters in each paragraph. Bah.