JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Name

Event — details for standard events, IE events and jQuery events

Synopsis

When an event handler is invoked, it is passed an Event object whose properties give details about the event, such as the type of event and the element on which it occurred. The methods of this Event object can control the propagation of the event. All modern browsers implement a standard event model, except IE, which, in version 8 and before, defines its own incompatible model. This page documents the standard event object properties and methods and the IE alternatives to them, and also covers the jQuery event object, which emulates a standard event object for IE. Read more about events in Chapter 17 and more about jQuery events in Handling Events with jQuery.

In the standard event model, different kinds of events have different kinds of event objects associated with them: mouse events have a MouseEvent object with mouse-related properties, for example, and keyboard events have a KeyEvent with key-related properties. Both the MouseEvent and KeyEvent types share a common Event superclass. In the IE and jQuery event models, however, a single Event object type is used for all events that can occur on Element objects. Event properties that are specific to keyboard events won’t have a useful value when a mouse event occurs, but those properties will still be defined. For simplicity, this page collapses the event hierarchy and documents the properties for all events that can be delivered to Element objects (and ...