Event Handler Problem Solved
The event handler problem is (more or less) solved.
Instead of the hacked up solutions I was proposing below, I've come up with a (possibly) better hacked up solution. What I'm proposing is that NW should define all event handlers needed to run the environment page for the page writer. No fuss, no ungodly long <body> tags.
But, of course, there's a problem. In IE, when I set an event handler programatically, I'm doing just that, setting it. Not appending to a set of handling functions, no, I'm just setting it. Mozilla's addEventListener function is much nicer, and can work in conjunction with inline definitions on tags, but alas I'm looking for a cross-browser solution here that doesn't suck, and coming up short.
Worst case (for now), we might have to dictate that page writers set handlers on the body function only through methods we define, and never directly on the tags themselves. It's onerous, and I'm not convinced that it's better in the short run, but I think it might be a good thing moving forward.
Time will tell.