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);

>>1 Since you are using the IE DOM.
Learn how to use i.insertAdjacentHTML() and i.style
Also, pick up the JavaScript pocket reference by O'Reilly so you don't need to ask questions.