Why can I not add a event listener to the text node itself instead of the p element?
<p>childNode</p>
...
p.childNodes[0].addEventListener('click',function(){alert('ok')},false)
When I click on childNode nothing happens in chrome
April 2021 Update
DOM mutation events such as DOMCharacterDataModified are now deprecated, and MutationObservers should be used instead.
Original answer
Text nodes simply don't fire most events: historically, elements have had the responsibility for doing that in HTML DOMs. However, text nodes do fire some events (except in IE <= 8): DOM mutation events. A particularly useful one for text nodes is DOMCharacterDataModified, which is used to detect change to a text node's text and can be useful in browser-based editors.
Example: http://www.jsfiddle.net/timdown/c6dHX/
document.getElementById("div")
.firstChild.addEventListener(
"DOMCharacterDataModified",
function(evt) {
console.log(
"Text changed from '"
+ evt.prevValue
+ "' to '"
+ evt.newValue
);
}, false);<div contenteditable id="div">Edit me.</div>