Do you love the wonderful javascript dollar shortcut $('myId') but cannot use jQuery or Prototype? Don’t worry, you can define your custom shortcut for the too long document.getElementById() function:
function $(id) { return document.getElementById(id); }
Now you can sobstitute this:
var divContent = document.getElementById('myId').innerHTML;
with this:
var divContent = $('myId').innerHTML;
Obviously you don’t get all the bells and whistles that you would get using jQuery, but it’s a start.