The Event Object Video

Question

In the video, Guil Hernandez says...

"In the last video you learn how events bubble up the DOM tree. For example clicking a list item also triggers a click event on the UL element containing the list item. This is useful because we can add an event listener to a parent element and let it handle events on its children."

I got really confused when he said that last part, "This is useful because we can add an event listener to a parent element and let it handle events on its children." I thought event bubbling happened when parents get affected by event handlers of their children. However, I don't get why he mentioned that we could simply add an event listener to a (PARENT ELEMENT) in order to let it handle events on it's children....???

I'm truly confused and I would appreciate it if somebody could please explain. Thanks in advance!

https://teamtreehouse.com/library/the-event-object-2

Answer 1 · 2019-02-26T18:53:23Z

February 26, 2019 6:53pm

Let's say you have a form or other element that has several clickable children. If you want to perform different actions depending on which child is clicked it may be useful to simply listen for the 'click' event in the parent and check the value of event.target. Keep in mind, though, that the click event handler on the parent will be called for any click event within its bounds, even if the target isn't one of the children.

Otherwise, you'd need to add click listeners to each of the children separately. There's no hard rule about when to choose one method over the other; it simply depends on your needs. The important point is that certain events (not the handlers) will propagate up the DOM tree and can be handled/captured at multiple points as opposed to events like 'focus' that do not bubble.

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The Event Object Video

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