How to prevent default action for an Anchor tag using Javascript?

Question

I'm trying to prevent default action on an anchor ("a") tag. In my scenario few lines of html are rendered on the fly using ajax (after a form is submitted) and I want to add an event listener that

1. performs an action when a newly created link is clicked

2. prevent the browser from opening that link.

Here's what I'm writing:

a = document.getElementById("new_link");
a.addEventListener("click",function(){alert("preform action");
                                      return false;},false);

I have also tried:

a.addEventListener("click",function(e){e.preventDefault(); alert("preform action");});

When I click on the link "a" it shows the alert message but still opens the "href" link where as I want it to show the message and then stop.

Both methods show alerts if attached to an pre-existing link but do not work when attached to newly inserted links (via ajax).. which is what I need to do.

Any help/suggestions.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Reviving an old topic, but I wanted to provide an option that didn't rely on jQuery.

a = document.getElementById("new_link");
a.addEventListener("click",function(){
     alert("preform action");
     window.event.preventDefault();
},false);