JavaScript: Cancelling events cross browser

Question

I am implementing a floating pop-up help control in an asp.net web site, and i'm using JQuery to implement the whizzy bits.

The pop up is made visible by clicking on a link, the link also has an href poining to another page to support users with JavaScript disabled. I added "return false;" to the end of the Javascript string in the onClick event of the link, to prevent Navigation to the href value, and was very happy until I realised that this is not supported in Firefox.

I've come across several articles pointing to the event.preventDefault method that can be used to get Firefox to behave in the same way, but in all cases the example involved seems to have some onerous pattern of explicitly adding events to the object concerned.

Is there a simple way to get this kind of syntax to work? I want to keep my control as simple as possible. Code example:

<a id="myLink" 
onclick="javascript:$('#myPanel').addClass('helpPopOn');return
false;" href="/pages/help.aspx?content=TestHelp">Help</a>

Answer 1

Explicitly adding events is onerous?

$("#myLink").click(function(e)
{
   $('#myPanel').addClass('helpPopOn');
   e.preventDefault();
});

Answer 2

While Shog9's answer is correct, for completeness the same logic obviously also applies to inline handlers:

<a id="myLink" onclick="javascript:$('#myPanel').addClass('helpPopOn');event.preventDefault();return false;" href="/pages/help.aspx?content=TestHelp">Help</a>

Answer 3

The answers so far either haven't quite done what I wanted, or didn't seem to work cross-browser. In the end, the following seems to be a compromise:

<a id="myLink" onclick="javascript:if (event.preventDefault) event.preventDefault();$('#myPanel').addClass('helpPopOn');return false;" href="/pages/help.aspx?content=TestHelp">Help</a>

Note the prevent default at the beginning, and the return false at the end. This seems to works across IE, Opera, Safari, and in Firefox it semi-works (the div will pop-up once, but not again). Anybody know how to get this working properly in FireFox?