Question

I want to make a script that disables hyperlinks and instead fires a function when one is clicked.

<a href="http://google.com"></a>

should work as

<a onclick="talk('http://google.com)'></a>

Is there a way to know when the wants to redirect and instead run “talk()” or display an alert window?

Answer 1

This solution uses (DOM Level 0) event handling instead of touching the href directly.

(function () {
    var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName('a'),
        i = anchors.length;
    while (i--) {
        anchors[i].onclick = function () {
            talk(this.href);
            return false;
        };
    }
}());

Edit: The benefit of this approach is it’s much simpler to put the href back when you want to. Given an anchor tAnchor, you merely need to unset the onclick attribute:

tAnchor.onclick = null