Setting innerHTML: Why won't it update the DOM?

Question

Wondering why I can\'t get document.getElementById(\"my_div\").innerHTML to update the DOM when I re-assign the variable. For example:

Answer 1

innerHTML evaluates to a string. I'm not sure why you would expect anything different. Consider this:

var a = 'foo'; // now a = 'foo'
var b = a; // now a = 'foo', b = 'foo'
b = 'bar'; // now a = 'foo', b = 'bar'

Re-assigning b doesn't change a.

Edited to add: In case it's not clear from the above, if you want to change innerHTML, you can just assign to it directly:

document.getElementById("my_div").innerHTML = "Hello";

You don't need, and can't use, an intermediary variable.