Dropping text word by word

Hi
I have set myself the task of re-writing a script that drops text word by word onto a page as it loads (cheesy but I’m interested from a point of view of learning Javascript) The original used document.layers which is no longer supported.
Basically I want to take the string defined by a <div> tag into my function using getElementById but I then need to break it into individual words to drop them. I thought I could manipulate the object as an array but it won’t accept an index. I also expected the object to have a property something like ‘text’ or ‘string’ but apparently not.
Grateful for any help, hope you can understand what I’m on about. A good recommendation for a book or website where Javascript objects and their properties are explained in some detail would be a good start!

Thanks

CookieB

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