[whatwg] Adding mouseenter and mouseleave events

[Magnus Kristiansen]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:10:33 +0100, Gareth Hay <gazhay at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not so sure it is a workaround though.
> If you know that the event will bubble, you can make your handler  
> prevent bubbling.
>
> I don't think we should be adding two new events to a spec, when the  
> existing events can work in the way you want, albeit with a line more  
> code. If we did, we'd be forever adding very specialized events.

You don't seem to understand the situation. Imagine there's a parent  
element and several child elements. Every time you mouse over a child  
element, a mouseover event triggers (and mouseout on the previous  
element). This event bubbles up until it reaches the parent element. An  
event handler on the parent can only prevent the events from bubbling  
event further (which is not relevant), not from reaching itself.

To prevent it using bubble cancelling you would have to attach events  
stopping bubbling to every child element of the target. Not only is this  
an unreliable way of doing it, it also interferes with potential other  
elements which actually want bubbling. The other, more practical  
workaround is to look at each incoming event and check "did this one come  
bubbling up, or does it belong here". However, workarounds do not solve  
the problem itself.

With mouseenter/leave, there is no bubbling. There is no need to attach  
handlers to arbitrary elements, and no need to manually check each  
incoming event to see if it's bubbling or direct. These events are linked  
to a significant enough use case. They are no more redundant than existing  
events like click (mousedown+mouseup) and keypress (keydown+keyup).

-- 
Magnus Kristiansen
"Don't worry; the Universe IS out to get you."