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How to tell what is directly manipulating styles in the DOM

I recently ran into a bug where I was not able to control the style of an HTML element (without using !important) due to the fact that something in my codebase was directly adding inline styles to my DOM element.
After quite a bit of digging, I discovered it was due to a third party module I was using that had: document.body.style.overflow = 'visible';
It was frustrating that it took me as long as it did to find the source of this issue and it got me wondering. Is there any efficient way to determine the source of direct DOM manipulation like this? There wasn't something obvious in the Chrome Dev Tools.

With Chrome you can add a DOM Breakpoint to that element, just right click the element from the inspector and the last option will let you add a breakpoint whenever an attribute is changed. That way you can easily see when an element is being changed.

Auto-refresh HTML tab in internet explorer

I made a nice website that does a lot of DOM manipulation. Works very nicely in chrome and firefox. Though the client has requested now that it also works in Internet Explorer. The latest version is good enough to start with (that would be 10.0.9200.16721 in my case).
So the adventure starts, i press F12 and see a set of pretty familiar developer tools (coming from chrome and firebug). As i'm tracking the JS code i notice that the HTML tab (with the DOM) doesn't actually update.
According to the manual here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/gg589512(v=vs.85).aspx it's "a good idea to refresh the HTML tab to get the current DOM, especially when you use dynamic elements." (d0h ??) problem is .. i can't find a button to enable automatic update of the HTML tab. So i would have to click the refresh button everytime i step into a new line of JS (never mind of real-time DOM view).
But that's not all ... every time i click the refresh button the whole DOM tree view collapses. And i have to click a bunch of pluses to view the node i'm interested in.
Does anyone have a solution for this? Because what would take days will take weeks this way...

Duplicate of How to inspect elements on dynamically created DOM by using IE developers tools
From doing a little digging aroung, it seems like this is an issue other people have reported too. This thread might be of some interest to you.
The most relevant part of it:
The problem is when you modify the dom (with or without jquery) from a callback which is called by a timeout, which is in a callback bound to an event, IE freaks out and doesn't update the dom tree in the development tool. Subsequent modifications to the changed tag in the dev tool won't have any effect.
According to my tests, it's the combination of that sequence of calls that make this happen. If the dom is modified from a settimeout callback but without being inside of an event callback, it works. If instead of settimeout you directly call a function that modifies the dom, it works.
Here's a working example of what you're saying to compound the issue.
Basically, this is an issue with IE. There is no fix available at the moment. The accepted answer on the other thread seems like a very poor workaround.

Finding bounded events in inspector

I've been wondering a long time about this. Is there a way in eg Chrome to see what events are bound to an element? Since many people now use jQuery with a syntax like the following:
$("a.subtle").click(function(){
//do something
});
Is there a way in the inspector to easily find this code? I know in the inspector you can go to the "event listeners"-tab to see what events are bound. Looking at an example I can see there is a click-event on the element with the js file of jQuery next to it, so this must somehow point to it, but of course it is obscured by all the jQuery code. Here's what I'm looking at:
So the question is, is there a quick way to find the jQuery code applied to an element? To be clear, I want to quickly find the code I posted up top.
I could search through the source code for a .click() on that class, but of course it could be done via its parent, or with .on(), or on so many bazillion ways..

Check out the Visual Event bookmarklet.
Here's a quote from their website:
Visual Event is an open source Javascript bookmarklet which provides debugging information about events that have been attached to DOM elements.
Visual Event shows:
Which elements have events attached to them.
The type of events attached to an element.
The code that will be run with [sic] the event is triggered.
The source file and line number for where the attached function was defined (Webkit browsers and Opera only).

Debugging features on Safari to find out when elements added to page

Is there a tool available on Safari to find out when new elements are being added to the page. I have a page where there are invisible elements added at that cause the page to scroll. The elements that I thought where the cause, don't seem to be. I'd like to know if there is a way to find out.

Safari's built-in debugging tools are limited to what Chrome and Firefox offers and as far as I know you cannot set a break point to detect when a node has been inserted.
If you really insist on using Safari to debug, you could use event listeners like below:
document.addEventListener('DOMNodeInserted', function (event) {
console.log('This element was added to the page:', event.target);
});

Using the Web Inspector (or Chrome Developer Tools), right click on the BODY element (or a more specific one, where the elements actually get added) and in the context menu, choose "Break on subtree modifications". Your JS code will break whenever the selected element's subtree gets modified (elements added/removed).

I think you could use "mutation observers".

DOM attribute change debugging

Somehow somewhere in my code one of the elements on the page gets a style attribute which I don't expect it to get. Namely, it gets style="position:fixed". I can see this happening in HTML tab in Firebug, but can't find it in the code. The application is fairly big and I can't simply look through all of the code to find the place, besides, several third-party libraries are being used (jQuery is one of them).
So, my question is, is it possible to somehow catch this style being changed and get the trace?

In Google Chrome, right click on an element in the page and select "Inspect Element." The Developer Tools window or pane will open with that element selected in the source view. You can then right click the selected tag and choose "Break on Attributes Modifications."

Well, after a couple of hours of googling and experimenting, it seems that the best one can do it setup a MutationEvent handler (Firefox supports them) like this:
var node_modified = function(evt) {
if(evt.attrName == 'style') {
alert('Style is changing from ' + evt.prevValue + ' to ' + evt.newValue);
}
}
var test_close = document.getElementById('test_close');
test_close.addEventListener('DOMAttrModified', node_modified, false);
An then set up some kind of logging throughout your code and see when this event gets triggered. Unfortunately, you can't just set up a breakpoint in the mutation event handler and see the stack trace, because event handler's stack trace has no information about the place in the code, where the event got triggered. Kind of logical, but I think that with some hacking this feature can be implemented in Firebug.
Thank you for your time!

In Firebug's HTML inspector you can right click on a node and there is an option to interrupt on attribute change.
Breakpoints persist through page reloads and you can also browse the call stack.

Sounds like you really need a debugger. Firebug has one built in, otherwise you can give Venkman a try, which I find a bit more cumbersome but perhaps is more effective..
Good luck! :)