 JavaScript Page 2 - Interactive Effects |
Ajax-Friendly Event Handling - JavaScriptIf you're looking for a quick way to delight your visitors with the addition of Ajax to your site, look no further. This article, the first part of a four-part series, will show you how to do some very nice interactive effects. It is excerpted from chapter four of Adding Ajax, written by Shelley Powers (O'Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596529368). Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.
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Event handlers have been part of JavaScript from the beginning. Most follow the onclick or onload format, where the handler begins with the keyword on, followed by the event name. Typically, the event handlers are placed within the object to which they're connected: <body onload="somefunction()"> Inline event handlers are still viable approaches for managing event capturing, except for two limitations: maintenance and mashability. Maintainable Event HandlingIf event handlers are added directly to page elements, and later there's a change to the function name or parameters, the web developer has to hunt down every occurrence of the load handler text and modify it. This approach of adding event handling isn't efficient, and with today's more complex and dynamically generated web pages, it's infeasible.
Rather than adding event handlers to objects, a better approach is to assign event handler functions in a scripting block, either in a separate JavaScript file or as a block of code in the head section of a document. This is known as the DOM level 0 event handling approach: <script type="text/javascript"> This is also a viable solution, but another problem arises when you assign a function to an event handler. In the example just given, assigning someFunction to the onclick event handler for the document object overwrites whatever other assignment has been made before this script is run. If you're incorporating external Ajax libraries or merging multiple Ajax libraries into an application, you can't assume that you "own" the event handler. Your code has to play well with others, unless you want to restrict all code to your code and your code only.
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