Suppose you have:
<div id="mydiv" class="oldclass">text</div>
and the following styles:
.oldclass { color: blue }
.newclass { background-color: yellow }
You can change the class on mydiv
in javascript like this:
document.getElementById('mydiv').className="newclass";
After the DOM manipulation you will be left with:
<div id="mydiv" class="newclass">text</div>
If you want to add a new css class without removing the old one, you can append to it:
document.getElementById('mydiv').className += ' newClass';
This will result in:
<div id="mydiv" class="oldclass newclass">text</div>