JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Name

EventTarget — an object that receives events

Synopsis

Objects that have events fired on them or objects to which events bubble need to have a way to define handlers for those events. These objects typically define event handler registration properties whose names begin with “on”, and they also typically define the methods described here. Event handler registration is a surprisingly complex topic. See Registering Event Handlers for details, and note, in particular, that IE8 and before use different methods, described in a special section following, than all other browsers do.

Methods

void addEventListener(string type, function listener, [boolean useCapture])

This method registers the specified listener function as an event handler for events of the specified type. type is an event name string and does not include an “on” prefix. The use Capture argument should be true if this is a capturing event handler (see addEventListener()) being registered on a document ancestor of the true event target. Note that some browsers still require you to pass a third argument to this function, and you must pass false to register an ordinary noncapturing handler.

boolean dispatchEvent(Event event)

This method dispatches a synthetic event to this event target. Create a new Event object with document.createEvent(Events), passing the event name (such as “event” for simple events). Next, call the event initialization method for the Event object you created: for a simple event, this will be initEvent()