How to get the onclick calling object?

I need to have a handler on the calling object of onclick event.

<a href="123.com" onclick="click123(event);">link</a>

<script>
  function click123(event) {
    //i need <a> so i can manipulate it with Jquery
  }
</script>

I want to do this without the use of $().click or $().live of jQuery but with the method described above.

pass in this in the inline click handler

<a href="123.com" onclick="click123(this);">link</a>

or use event.target in the function (according to the W3C DOM Level 2 Event model)

function click123(event)
{
    var a = event.target;
}

But of course, IE is different, so the vanilla JavaScript way of handling this is

function doSomething(e) {
    var targ;
    if (!e) var e = window.event;
    if (e.target) targ = e.target;
    else if (e.srcElement) targ = e.srcElement;
    if (targ.nodeType == 3) // defeat Safari bug
        targ = targ.parentNode;
}

or less verbose

function doSomething(e) {

    e = e || window.event;
    var targ = e.target || e.srcElement || e;
    if (targ.nodeType == 3) targ = targ.parentNode; // defeat Safari bug
}

where e is the event object that is passed to the function in browsers other than IE.

If you're using jQuery though, I would strongly encourage unobtrusive JavaScript and use jQuery to bind event handlers to elements.

The easiest way is to pass this to the click123 function or you can also do something like this(cross-browser):

function click123(e){
  e = e || window.event;
  var src = e.target || e.srcElement;
  //src element is the eventsource
}