Fix attribute types with spaces?

I was just curious, is there possibly any fix for attributes that are 
supposed to be values separated by spaces (like class)?  I see a lot of 
code like this:

document.getElementById('test').className += " newClass"

And I wonder why elements like these couldn't be treated/returned as an 
array or something like that.  I personally don't think that treating 
these values as strings is such a great idea, since getting rid of them 
requires the use of regular expressions in most languages.

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