Develop Reference

jQuery(document).on("keydown",...) works, but not document.addEventListener("keydown",...)

I thought I should see how much I really need jQuery now. So I started by replacing
jQuery(document).on("keydown.", function(e){...})
with
document.addEventListener("keydown", function(e){...})
I believed that one was easy, but to my surprise the event was no longer fired. To investigate this a bit I entered the second version in the console. Now it worked. ;-)
That is a bit impractical, of course. I would prefer that I did not have to enter it in the console...
In the code the event listener is added right after some changes to the DOM, i e some additions. I guess the trouble might be related to this, but I have no idea what to do.
Any suggestions?
EDIT: Thanks everyone for the comments. In this particular case it would be good to get rid of jQuery (but otherwise it is no problem using jQuery of course).
I should have said that some DOM elements are added long after the page is loaded so window.onload etc is not useful here.
I should maybe also have said that I am testing this in the latest version of Chrome and for this I am not interested in backward compatibility (it is too complicated anyway in this case so I have just dropped that... ;-) ).
UPDATE: Someone asked for code. Here is an example I just tested:
document.addEventListener("keydown.test", function(e){
console.log("doc.addEL test keydown, e=", e)
});
Looking in Chrome Dev Tools at the properties of the HTML element I can see the event listener there (with the code above). It is just not fired. Seems like it is just time to write yet another bug report then. ;-)

My bad. I misread the news that event handlers now can be removed using standard syntax. They can, but the syntax is that you give the event+handler function to removeEventListener.
The syntax I used above for the event, "keydown.test", is not a valid syntax (if you are not using jQuery).
Sorry for wasting your time. Hope someone can use the answer.

Internet Explorer 7 onclick event on submit button does not fire

I have a form which submits via ajax to the back-end and I'm writing a general disable function in javascript that I can use to set the onclick of an element. Typing this into the browser so ignore any syntax errors in the following.
function(elementID , processingText) {
var element = document.getElementById(elementID);
if (element) {
element.setAttribute("onClick", "alert('test')");
}
}
So basically the element should have an onclick event to set an alert. I can confirm that the onclick attribute is being set correctly and it fires in IE8+, Chrome and Firefox. It will not fire in IE7.
The element I'm testing on is a submit button in a form (one form on the page). It has many fields and one submit button.
EDIT The code dispatches with an action so it should submit anyway but not until after the alert has been acknowledged /EDIT
I've trawled the net for the past two hours and the following solutions do not work or are not an option-
Add a hidden input field to form.
Wrap submit button in tag and set the onclick in this tag.
Changing case of onclick to onClick
Any solutions which involve altering the html without using javascript are not an option, I'm trying to create a general disableElement function. I can target the script at IE7 so it does not have to work in all browsers, just IE7.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

IE7 has a lot of compatibility issues, of which this is just one. If you're writing javascript that needs to be compatible with IE7, you will end up writing a lot of redundant code that does the same thing in two different ways to cater for different browsers you're supporting.
Issues like this in old browsers are precicely the reason why libraries like jQuery exist. jQuery does a lot of things, but one thing it does very well is iron out many of these nasty little quirks that crop up when writing cross-browser javascript.
The cross-browser issues have become less important in recent years, as modern browsers (including IE) have much better standards support, but if you're supporting old browsers , and old IE versions in particular, my recommendation is to use jQuery (or a similar library), because they have already solved this problem, and plenty of others that will catch you out.
If you do use jQuery, your code will become:
$(element).click(function() {alert('test');});
Before anyone points it out, yes I know the OP didn't specify jQuery in the question, and may not want a jQuery answer, but in this case I would say it is the best answer available, because if you don't use it, you will end up having to write much of the same compatibility code yourself that is already in jQuery.

IE 7 does support setAttribute method but it seems that it is not possible to change an onclick attribute with it. For more info about this issue check this: Why does an onclick property set with setAttribute fail to work in IE?
Cheers

addEventListener() without getElementById reference success?

Check out this fiddle (partial code snippet below): http://jsfiddle.net/QJJb8/
<button id='mybutton'>MY BUTTON</button>
mybutton.addEventListener('click', mybuttonClick, false);
function mybuttonClick(e){
alert(e.target.textContent+' WAS CLICKED!');
}
Note how I'm not using getElementById() to get a reference to the button. Why does it still work? (Tested in Firefox, Chrome and IE9 & 10.)
Is it bad-practice/quirk, or is it built in functionality for button elements? If the latter, that's an awesome perk/shortcut when using button elements! Or perhaps I've just been over-using getElementById() all this time?
//ANSWER UPDATE//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
After some research it seems the behavior discussed above is in fact part of the HTML5 spec. In addition to RobG's answer below, see also the following links for more insight:
http://tjvantoll.com/2012/07/19/dom-element-references-as-global-variables/
https://stackoverflow.com/a/3434388/2434324 (link supplied by yoelp)
http://jsperf.com/named-access-on-the-window-object

Because way back at the begining of browser scripting, IE decided to make element names and IDs global variables that referenced the element. Everyone else thought that was a bad idea (it was) and didn't do it.
However, IE grabbed about 95% of the browser market and developers developed for IE's quirks, so other browsers implemented the same behaviour but didn't advertise it (same with support for document.all). So now all browsers do it, but (almost) no one uses it.
Except when someone stumbles across it…
So where you have:
<button id='mybutton' ...>
browsers create a global mybutton variable that references the element.

This works on all DOM elements, not only buttons, Its probably a bad practice since any one may change mybutton to something else (ie.mybutton = "BLABLA") then your code breaks
also see this

How can I view the data attributes value live in the chrome developers tool?

I want to see the values as I explore the DOM in the developers tool. And also if possible see what binded to the element javascript wise. Is this possible using some plug in or how would I go about doing this?

Data attributes can be seen on the element: http://cl.ly/0w3V2H311E21241J2j45
If you're using jQuerys .data(), it doesn't change the data attributes of the element, so you have to call .data() to get it see it. I am not aware of any plugins that allow you to view it in the DOM explorer.
Event listeners can be found to the right by clicking on the element. Scroll down to the bottom of the CSS rules and you will see a section called "Event Listeners": http://cl.ly/2f3c3z312c3D2w43321s

Sorry if you are limited to use only Chrome developer tools.
However for others who can use Firefox it may be useful to know that there is a great extension for Firebug: FireQuery, which is doing exactly what you ask plus other nice things.

How to list all registered events of a DOM node using JavaScript?

I can add or remove an event handler for a DOM node. Is it possible to find out all the registered events handlers of a given DOM node? I am referring to straight Javascript meaning no frameworks or toolkits like jQuery, dojo, Prototype, GWT, etc. If the answer is no, any reason why? Security issues?

I know this is an old question, but just in case, for chrome you can use getEventListeners
getEventListeners function
as mentioned here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/17466308/538752

DOM Level 3 specifies eventListenerList - however, I'm not aware of any DOM implementation which supports this - or any other reliable way to list the event listeners. It seems to have been an oversight to this point.

This works for Chrome/Safari console:
getEventListeners(document.getElementByID('myElementId'));

Visual Event can show you which events are registered, but it only works with DOM level 0 attached events; the W3C level 2 implementation as well as the Internet Explorer proprietary method are not supported and/or cannot be retrieved.

If your interest is to discover some event, in order to disable it - I came here because of that - I recommend to use the Firebug extension, with Mozilla Firefox. Selecting the part of the document, you are interested in, look at the right panel, the Events tab: you will see all events, and can even disable them.

Also, in Google Chrome, please select the element and notice the number, it will show you $0 or any other number.
Then in console, type this code and press enter.
getEventListeners($0)
and then you will see the result. Please see the image below for more elaboration.

I faced the same problem, landed here, and didn't find an useful answer.
In case you can execute script before addEventListener calls from other parties, you might do something really dirty like:
var obj = something; // Your DOM element you want to watch
var beforeAddEvent = obj.addEventListener;
obj.addEventListener = function() {
// Do something with arguments here (like storing in an array)
// arguments[0]: event name
// arguments[1]: Listener function
// arguments[3]: eventual options passed
// If you don't call this, the event listener won't even be attached, it might be also useful in some case
beforeAddEvent.apply(obj, arguments);
};