Web Developer

[Edit: fixed CSS syntax in these examples. The development code is fine in that regard.]

Using Firefox 5 on Windows 7, I ran into two related problems that must be common enough for there to be standard workarounds.

1. CSS is not applied until after Javascript runs. Given the CSS:

#id { width: 50px; }

document.getElementById("id").style.width is undefined. This is using jquery's $(document).ready() which runs after everything else is supposed to be loaded. The standard body onload will run even earlier, with less of a chance that the CSS will be loaded if the problem is due to a race.

Javascript can see the CSS style if it is set in the contents of an HTML style="" attribute, but you lose the benefits of CSS if you have multiple tags sharing the same style.

2. Previously defined CSS does not apply to new nodes created by Javascript. [Edit #2: This does work. I had a typo in my code.]

div.myclass { width: 50px; }  /* CSS */

var node = document.createElement("div"); // JS
node.setAttribute("class", myclass"); // CSS is not applied.
node.className = "myclass"; // CSS is not applied.

One solution to this one is to code every single CSS style change in Javascript using the DOM, but I would prefer not to have to do that.

What are the best practices in these situations?