Question

How can you decorate a DOM node so that you add an event handler, but within the new handler you can call the previous handler?

Answer 1

I assume that you are binding events in the way element.onclick = function () {};.

Yes, you can make a function that wraps previous event handlers and execute them sequentially, e.g.:

function addEvent(el, event, handler) {
  var oldEvent = el['on'+event];
  if (typeof oldEvent != 'function') {
    el['on'+event] = handler;
  } else {
    el['on'+event] = function() {
      oldEvent();
      handler();
    }
  }
}

var el = document.getElementById('el');
addEvent(el, 'click', function () { alert('1'); });
addEvent(el, 'click', function () { alert('2'); });

Check the above example here.