[whatwg] Adding mouseenter and mouseleave events

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Wed May 7 17:55:30 PDT 2008


On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Magnus Kristiansen wrote:
>
> Mouseover/out events will trigger when elements contained inside the
> EventTarget are hovered, and then bubble up. This is contrary to the most
> obvious interpretation, as you are still inside (over) the targeted element.
> IE supports two events, mouseenter[1] and mouseleave[2], which solve this
> problem by not bubbling.
> 
> It is possible to work around the problem by using target/relatedTarget and
> walking up the DOM tree. However, this requires extra code for every event
> handler. Besides, these events were often not meant to be generated in the
> first place, by the intent of the author.
> 
> I have no statistics for how often mouseover/out are used with and without
> intent of bubbling, but the anecdotal evidence from my own experience has
> never found me wanting it.
> 
> I suggest these two events be added to the web applications spec.
> 
> [1]
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/events/onmouseenter.asp
> [2]
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/events/onmouseleave.asp

I recommend sending this feedback to the WebAPI working group, which is 
working on DOM events.

(I shall forward the thread to the working group, but I do not know if the 
WebAPI working group has an effective issue tracking mechanism, so you may 
wish to follow this up to ensure that it gets handled.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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