setAttribute and text

Is it possible to change the colour of a text with setAttribute? This piece of code does what I asked it to do, it prints the text

"<font color=\"08870e\">Condition true</font>"

However I want it to recognize that I'm adding "font" container.

This is the code.

    if(condition) {
        $("status").set开发者_如何学C("text", "<font color=\"08870e\">Condition true</font>");
    }
else
    {
        $("status").set("text", "<font color=\"03i9ie\">Condition false</font>");
    }
if(condition2) 
{
        $("status2").set("text", "Condition 2 is true");
    }
else
    {
        $("status2").set("text", "Condition 2 is false");

By the way, it's in the function which is called every 15 seconds therefore other methods aren't preferred.

Update: $ = document.getElementById

You need somthing like this:

$("status").text("Condition is true").css("color", "green");
$("status").text("Condition is false").css("color", "red"); // or .css("color", "#ff0000");

instead of named colors like "red", you can use hex rgb values "#ff0000"

Update: If $ = document.getElementById then here's a JS way:

$("status").innerText = "Condition is false";  // .textContent for anything other than IE < 9 and non IE browsers.
$("status").style.color = "#ff0000";

Apologies for assuming $ was part of jQuery. Removed the tag jQuery from here and edited the question.