Tried something different and it's not working... can elements be created within an object literal?

Hello all you funky cold medina's out there...

Between the Appending & Removing Elements video and the one before it, Creating Elements, Chalkmeister makes the createNewTaskElement function and in it, he does this.

var createNewTaskElement = function(taskString) 
{
    //create list item
    var listItem = document.createElement("li"); 
    //checkbox
    var checkbox = document.createElement("input"); 
    //label
    var label = document.createElement("label"); 
    //input (text)
    var editInput = document.createElement("input"); 
    //button.edit
    var editButton = document.createElement("button");      
    //button.delete
    var deleteButton = document.createElement("button");


    //Each element needs modifying
        //all proper properties and attributes

    //Each element need appending 
    listItem.appendChild(checkbox);
    listItem.appendChild(label);
    listItem.appendChild(editInput);
    listItem.appendChild(editButton);
    listItem.appendChild(deleteButton);

    return listItem;
}

So, there I sit, looking over Andrew Chalkley 's code and I get to thinking and then I says to my myself... I says... "Hey Huck, that looks rather verbose and you are really trying to stick to nice and neat DRY code so why don't you group the variables up and ... oh, I know! It's all related to one thing so why don't you try sticking all that stuffs in an object and then use a for in loop to append all that stuff??"

"Yeah!" I replied to myself with pride.

So then I reworked it so it looked like this...

var createNewTaskElement = function(taskString) 
{
    //create list item

    var 
        listItem = document.createElement("li"), //list item
        newTask = {
            checkbox : document.createElement("input"), //checkbox
            label : document.createElement("label"), //label
            editInput : document.createElement("input"), //input (text)
            editButton : document.createElement("button"),//button.edit     
            deleteButton : document.createElement("button")//button.delete
            };

    //Each element needs modifying
        //all proper properties and attributes

    //Each element need appending 
    for(element in newTask)
    {
        listItem.appendChild(element);
    }

    return listItem;
}

so this creates the listItem first and then initializes an object literal with what I thought would be all the additional elements and then I thought the for in loop would just run through that object and append all the elements.

The only problem is, it doesn't. It doesn't work and I get this...

Soooo ... wassup? Why can't I do this? It's definitely telling me that the parameter (element) I'm trying to give it as the thingy to append is in fact NOT a node so that tells me that the key values aren't being created. I'm obviously fairly new to working with the DOM and all its loveliness but, I dunno, it just seemed like something you could do. You can create key value pairs out of thin air just like you'd initialize a variable so why doesn't this work?

Is a method on the document object considered not a valid expression and therefore cannot be set as a value in an object?

Any help and insight as to why this won't work would be lovely and much appreciated.

Thanks all & cheers,

Huck -