Overriding native function?

Question

The native document.createElement() is silly-stupid (it takes only a tag name and no attributes). How come I can\'t override it? How come this doesn\'t work?

Answer 1

FWIW (informational): you can override "native" methods, in some cases, and in some browsers at least. Firefox lets me do this:

document.createElement = function(f) { alert(f); };

Which then does as you expect when invoked. But your whole block of code above throws an error, at least via Firebug.

Philosophically, you should be able to do this. You can certainly, say, redefine methods on the Array object, etc. But the window (DOM) methods are not covered by ECMAScript, and so they're probably allowed to be implementation-dependent. And of course, they are this way for security reasons.