javascript - How can I determine if a dynamically-created DOM element has been added to the DOM?

Question

According to spec, only the BODY and FRAMESET elements provide an "onload" event to attach to, but I would like to know when a dynamically-created DOM element has been added to the DOM in JavaScript.

The super-naive heuristics I am currently using, which work, are as follows:

• Traverse the parentNode property of the element back until I find the ultimate ancestor (i.e. parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.etc until parentNode is null)
  
  
• If the ultimate ancestor has a defined, non-null body property
  
  
  • assume the element in question is part of the dom
• else
  
  
  • repeat these steps again in 100 milliseconds

What I am after is either confirmation that what I am doing is sufficient (again, it is working in both IE7 and FF3) or a better solution that, for whatever reason, I have been completely oblivious to; perhaps other properties I should be checking, etc.

---

EDIT: I want a browser-agnostic way of doing this, I don't live in a one-browser world, unfortunately; that said, browser-specific information is appreciated, but please note which browser you know that it does work in. Thanks!

Answer 1

UPDATE: For anyone interested in it, here is the implementation I finally used:

function isInDOMTree(node) {
   // If the farthest-back ancestor of our node has a "body"
   // property (that node would be the document itself), 
   // we assume it is in the page's DOM tree.
   return !!(findUltimateAncestor(node).body);
}
function findUltimateAncestor(node) {
   // Walk up the DOM tree until we are at the top (parentNode 
   // will return null at that point).
   // NOTE: this will return the same node that was passed in 
   // if it has no ancestors.
   var ancestor = node;
   while(ancestor.parentNode) {
      ancestor = ancestor.parentNode;
   }
   return ancestor;
}

The reason I wanted this is to provide a way of synthesizing the onload event for DOM elements. Here is that function (although I am using something slightly different because I am using it in conjunction with MochiKit):

function executeOnLoad(node, func) {
   // This function will check, every tenth of a second, to see if 
   // our element is a part of the DOM tree - as soon as we know 
   // that it is, we execute the provided function.
   if(isInDOMTree(node)) {
      func();
   } else {
      setTimeout(function() { executeOnLoad(node, func); }, 100);
   }
}

For an example, this setup could be used as follows:

var mySpan = document.createElement("span");
mySpan.innerHTML = "Hello world!";
executeOnLoad(mySpan, function(node) { 
   alert('Added to DOM tree. ' + node.innerHTML);
});

// now, at some point later in code, this
// node would be appended to the document
document.body.appendChild(mySpan);

// sometime after this is executed, but no more than 100 ms after,
// the anonymous function I passed to executeOnLoad() would execute

Hope that is useful to someone.

NOTE: the reason I ended up with this solution rather than Darryl's answer was because the getElementById technique only works if you are within the same document; I have some iframes on a page and the pages communicate between each other in some complex ways - when I tried this, the problem was that it couldn't find the element because it was part of a different document than the code it was executing in.