I am doing it wrong in JavaScript

Yeah, JS is a scripting language and not a programming language, whatever. Anyway, I've got a page where the script does the following a couple of times:

var i = document.createElement('div');
i.innerHTML = 'some text';
i.class = 'some CSS class';
document.getElementById('element already in the page').appendChild(i);

You just create a prototype or a factory function, big deal. Prototypes are actually nice in the sense they require less abstraction providing the same functionality. The problem is they are probably harder to document and definitely harder to maintain.