In my opinion, the DOM Level 3 events DOMNodeInsertedhelp (which fires only for nodes) and DOMSubtreeModifiedhelp (which fires for virtually any modification, like attribute changes) are your best shot to accomplish that task. Of course, the big downside of those events is, that the Internet Explorers of this world don’t support them (…well, IE9 does). … Read more
To bring this up to date, the DOM4 standard does away with Mutation Events and replaces them with Mutation Observers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObserver
Ultimate approach so far, with smallest code: (IE11+, FF, Webkit) Using MutationObserver and falling back to the deprecated Mutation events if needed: (Example below if only for DOM changes concerning nodes appended or removed) var observeDOM = (function(){ var MutationObserver = window.MutationObserver || window.WebKitMutationObserver; return function( obj, callback ){ if( !obj || obj.nodeType !== 1 … Read more