Question

I’ve got a browser plug-in I’m working on and I want it to behave a certain way when the user clicks things. Not limited to, but including, a behavior for links!

The problem is that the plug-in has to work for a wide variety of sites, and some of those sites use the dreaded pseudo-protocol such as:
<a href="javascript: showSomeElement();">Show Element</a>

Currently my behavior is added to the anchor tag via
anchor.addEventListener('click', superAwesomeFunction);

Unfortunately this has a problem where the click listener only fires once. If I preventDefault() of course the click listener sticks around, but I’ve now broken the host site! Otherwise, clicking the link fires the click listener but only on the first click. I’m wondering why my superAwesomeFunction() doesn’t fire again if the link is clicked a second time. Is href="javascript:things()" doing more than I know?

Answer 1

It is possible to add an event listener to a link that has a JavaScript function call set in the href attribute.

Here’s a jsFiddle that shows it working. Both functions fire each time the link is clicked.

There must be something else going on with your code beyond what we can see in what you gave us.