If you view the source on the generated page, you'll see that all tag IDs are prefixed w/ namespace information. This helps to ensure you won't end up with field ID collisions on the final rendered phase (i.e. two different portlets use two different forms that just happen to want to use the ID "projectFromDate" or input fields w/ the same ID "name").
When writing javascript code you either want to pass in namespaced IDs as function parameters or leverage some CSS selector magic to expose your particular form (i.e. give the elements a special class so you can write selectors to find the elements w/ the class).
