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JavaScript JavaScript and the DOM (Retiring) Traversing the DOM Using previousElementSibling and insertBefore

Min-Chun Shih
Min-Chun Shih
5,221 Points
Posted by Min-Chun Shih
Min-Chun Shih
5,221 Points

When adding remove and up button, why still need the if statement of 'event.target.tagName == 'BUTTON'

I don't understand why Joel doesn't delete the if statement for checking if the tagName is button? Because it works without the if statement. Thank you!

listUl.addEventListener('click', (event) => {
//  if(event.target.tagName == 'BUTTON') {
  if(event.target.className == 'remove') {
    let li = event.target.parentNode;
    let ul = li.parentNode;
    ul.removeChild(li);
  }
  if(event.target.className == 'up') {
    let li = event.target.parentNode;
    let prevLi = li.previousElementSibling;
    let ul = li.parentNode;
    if (prevLi) {
      ul.insertBefore(li, prevLi);
    }    
  }
  }
});

1 Answer

John Johnson
John Johnson
11,789 Points
John Johnson
John Johnson
11,789 Points

The short answer is: specificity. Having more specific rules for how and when JavaScript fires will make your code less prone to errors (in most cases).

The click event will trigger every time you click in the listUl, whether it does anything or not. Setting that first "if(event.target.tagName = 'button')" basically just makes sure that the only time this event will do an action is when you have clicked a button. In your case, you're right. This page works without it because the second delimiter, 'className = remove' only applies to the remove button itself.

Say for some reason you had to give one of the li elements the class remove. If you click it, it will be removed (or it's parent node, in this case). Well, depending on the specificity, you could accidentally remove the entire list! That example seems silly for this case, but in other websites, lack of specificity can cause big issues.

Hope this answers your question!