How to get the background color of an HTML element?

As with all css properties that contain hyphens, their corresponding names in JS is to remove the hyphen and make the following letter capital: backgroundColor

alert(myDiv.style.backgroundColor);

Get at number:

window.getComputedStyle( *Element* , null).getPropertyValue( *CSS* );

Example:

window.getComputedStyle( document.body ,null).getPropertyValue('background-color');  
window.getComputedStyle( document.body ,null).getPropertyValue('width');  
~ document.body.clientWidth