How does one use the onerror attribute of an img element

This works:

<img src="invalid_link"
     onerror="this.onerror=null;this.src='https://placeimg.com/200/300/animals';"
>

Live demo: http://jsfiddle.net/oLqfxjoz/

As Nikola pointed out in the comment below, in case the backup URL is invalid as well, some browsers will trigger the "error" event again which will result in an infinite loop. We can guard against this by simply nullifying the "error" handler via this.onerror=null;.

This is actually tricky, especially if you plan on returning an image url for use cases where you need to concatenate strings with the onerror condition image URL, e.g. you might want to programatically set the url parameter in CSS.

The trick is that image loading is asynchronous by nature so the onerror doesn't happen sunchronously, i.e. if you call returnPhotoURL it immediately returns undefined bcs the asynchronous method of loading/handling the image load just began.

So, you really need to wrap your script in a Promise then call it like below. NOTE: my sample script does some other things but shows the general concept:

returnPhotoURL().then(function(value){
    doc.getElementById("account-section-image").style.backgroundImage = "url('" + value + "')";
}); 


function returnPhotoURL(){
    return new Promise(function(resolve, reject){
        var img = new Image();
        //if the user does not have a photoURL let's try and get one from gravatar
        if (!firebase.auth().currentUser.photoURL) {
            //first we have to see if user han an email
            if(firebase.auth().currentUser.email){
                //set sign-in-button background image to gravatar url
                img.addEventListener('load', function() {
                    resolve (getGravatar(firebase.auth().currentUser.email, 48));
                }, false);
                img.addEventListener('error', function() {
                    resolve ('//rack.pub/media/fallbackImage.png');
                }, false);            
                img.src = getGravatar(firebase.auth().currentUser.email, 48);
            } else {
                resolve ('//rack.pub/media/fallbackImage.png');
            }
        } else {
            img.addEventListener('load', function() {
                resolve (firebase.auth().currentUser.photoURL);
            }, false);
            img.addEventListener('error', function() {
                resolve ('https://rack.pub/media/fallbackImage.png');
            }, false);      
            img.src = firebase.auth().currentUser.photoURL;
        }
    });
}

very simple

  <img onload="loaded(this, 'success')" onerror="error(this, 
 'error')"  src="someurl"  alt="" />

 function loaded(_this, status){
   console.log(_this, status)
  // do your work in load
 }
 function error(_this, status){
  console.log(_this, status)
  // do your work in error
  }