how do I disable a hyperlink control on the fly in javascript

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ASP.NET

I am working on an asp.net project where I need to be able to disable several hyperlink controls on the fly in javascript when the user starts a transaction. I don’t want them to be clicking links in the middle of it – accidental or not.

I have researched and tried several things that have not worked. This involved setting the “enabled” property to false, “disabled” properlty to true and settign the .href property to “#”. None of these worked.

I then discovered that even trying to access the hyperlink field using “document.getelementbyid” was unsuccessful, so this could be a HUGE part of the issue…

I tried using the following… (also tried using the clientid and still no go)

var myHL = document.getElementById("MainContent_hl_first"); (doesn’t seem to work)
myHL.enabled = false (doesn’t work because above assignment doesn’t work)
myHL.disabled=false(ditto)

also tried…
document.getElementById("MainContent_hl_first").enabled=false; (doesn’t work)

also tried
document.getElementById("MainContent_hl_first").disabled = false; (doesn’t work)

As a test, I hard coded an “onclick” event into the html code that sets up the element and it works… So how can I add this on the fly in javascript, keeping in mind that accessing the control using the document.getelementbyid doesn’t seem to work? (because otherwise I could have just set the .onclick event…)

onclick="return false"

(unfortunately on this site because of the formatting when I pasted my html code for the above, it totally changed it around and left a bunch of stuff out and replaced other stuff - so it's useless to paste anything in with html tags in it...)