Can I use JavaScript to set the 'name' attribute?

Have you tried simply assigning a new name to the elements name property? I'm not sure how cross-browser that is but it shold work with anything supporting DOM level 1.

I'm not sure why you would use setAttribute to perform this?

Sitepoint liesis talking about a different usage of ‘name’ (see Anthony's comment). It's not read-only, it's just there's a long-standing IE bug (up to v7) where setting ‘name’ on form fields is only partially effective. Radio buttons in particular don't accept it properly.

The Microsoft-endorsed solution, as detailed here is to use a horrific misfeature of IE's version of the createElement call to set attributes at the same time:

var radio= document.createElement('<input type="radio" name="test" value="a" />');

Probably a better way would simply be to use good old innerHTML, eg.:

var div= document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML= '<input type="radio" name="test" value="a" />';
var radio= div.firstChild;

Why not use setAttribute("name", yourValue) it works perfectly fine.

This worked for me

alert(document.getElementById('testInput').name);
document.getElementById('testInput').name = 'someName';
alert(document.getElementById('testInput').name);

With

<input type="radio" name="test" id="testInput" />