Get a CSS value with JavaScript

Question

I know I can set a CSS value through JavaScript such as:

document.getElementById(\'image_1\').style.top = \'100px\';

But, can I

Answer 1

The element.style property lets you know only the CSS properties that were defined as inline in that element (programmatically, or defined in the style attribute of the element), you should get the computed style.

Is not so easy to do it in a cross-browser way, IE has its own way, through the element.currentStyle property, and the DOM Level 2 standard way, implemented by other browsers is through the document.defaultView.getComputedStyle method.

The two ways have differences, for example, the IE element.currentStyle property expect that you access the CSS property names composed of two or more words in camelCase (e.g. maxHeight, fontSize, backgroundColor, etc), the standard way expects the properties with the words separated with dashes (e.g. max-height, font-size, background-color, etc). ......

function getStyle(el, styleProp) {
    var value, defaultView = (el.ownerDocument || document).defaultView;
    // W3C standard way:
    if (defaultView && defaultView.getComputedStyle) {
        // sanitize property name to css notation
        // (hyphen separated words eg. font-Size)
        styleProp = styleProp.replace(/([A-Z])/g, "-$1").toLowerCase();
        return defaultView.getComputedStyle(el, null).getPropertyValue(styleProp);
    } else if (el.currentStyle) { // IE
        // sanitize property name to camelCase
        styleProp = styleProp.replace(/\-(\w)/g, function(str, letter) {
            return letter.toUpperCase();
        });
        value = el.currentStyle[styleProp];
        // convert other units to pixels on IE
        if (/^\d+(em|pt|%|ex)?$/i.test(value)) { 
            return (function(value) {
                var oldLeft = el.style.left, oldRsLeft = el.runtimeStyle.left;
                el.runtimeStyle.left = el.currentStyle.left;
                el.style.left = value || 0;
                value = el.style.pixelLeft + "px";
                el.style.left = oldLeft;
                el.runtimeStyle.left = oldRsLeft;
                return value;
            })(value);
        }
        return value;
    }
}

Main reference stackoverflow