Cross browser solution for checking if a Javascript object is an html element

The following code work in FF but not IE8:

var j = "test";
alert(j i开发者_开发技巧nstanceof HTMLElement);

I don't think IE uses the HTMLElement object. Is there a safe way to do this check in IE? Perhaps there is a YUI solution?

I use to check the nodeType property, it should be 1 for all HTML element objects.

I used it in my crossbrowser library before I switched to jQuery.

text has a nodeType of 3 and any custom objects probably won't have a nodeType property at all.

If you look at the jQuery source code (not the minified one ffs!), you'll see they make use of nodeType a lot.