Real World XML

Using Events in JavaScript

When you load an XML document in a browser, the browser can keep track of the success or failure of the operation. When the user clicks a button in a Web page or uses the mouse, the browser keeps track of that, too. How does the browser inform your JavaScript code what's going on? It uses events.

For example, when the user clicks a Web page, a mouseDown event occurs. To handle that event in your code, you can connect code to that event. Most HTML tags now support events using attributes such as onMouseDown that you use to connect events to JavaScript code. Here's an example. In this case, when the user clicks the Web page, a mouseDown event occurs. Using the onMouseDown attribute, I can execute JavaScript code to perform ...