Availability

DOM Level 2 Events

Subinterfaces

MutationEvent, UIEvent

Constants

These constants are the legal values of the eventPhase property; they represent the current phase of event propagation for this event:

unsigned short CAPTURING_PHASE = 1

The event is in its capturing phase.

unsigned short AT_TARGET = 2

The event is being handled by its target node.

unsigned short BUBBLING_PHASE = 3

The event is bubbling.

Properties

readonly boolean bubbles

true if the event is of a type that bubbles (unless stopPropagation( ) is called); false otherwise.

readonly boolean cancelable

true if the default action associated with the event can be canceled with preventDefault( ); false otherwise.

readonly EventTarget currentTarget

The Document node that is currently handling this event. During capturing and bubbling, this is different from target. Note that all nodes implement the EventTarget interface, and the currentTarget property may refer to any node; it is not restricted to Element nodes.

readonly unsigned short eventPhase

The current phase of event propagation. The three previous constants define the legal values for this property.

readonly EventTarget target

The target node for this event; i.e., the node that generated the event. Note that this may be any node; it is not restricted to Element nodes.

readonly Date timeStamp

The date and time at which the event occurred (or, technically, at which the Event object was created). Implementations are not required to provide valid time data in this field, and if they do not, the getTime( ) method of this Date object should return 0. See the Date object in the core reference section of this book.

readonly String type

The name of the event that this Event object represents. This is the name under which the event handler was registered, or the name of the event handler property with the leading "on" removed. For example, "click", "load", or "submit". See Table 19-3 in Chapter 19 for a complete list of event types defined by the DOM standard.

Methods

initEvent( )

Initializes the properties of a newly created Event object.

preventDefault( )

Tells the web browser not to perform the default action associated with this event, if there is one. If the event is not of a type that is cancelable, this method has no effect.

stopPropagation( )

Stops the event from propagating any further through the capturing, target, or bubbling phases of event propagation. After this method is called, any other event handlers for the same event on the same node will be called, but the event will not be dispatched to any other nodes.

Description

This interface represents an event that occurred on some node of the document and contains details about the event. Various subinterfaces of Event define additional properties that provide details pertinent to specific types of events.

Many event types use a more specific subinterface of Event to describe the event that has occurred. However, the event types defined by the HTMLEvents module use the Event interface directly. These event types are: "abort", "blur", "change", "error", "focus", "load", "reset", "resize", "scroll", "select", "submit", and "unload".

See Also

EventListener, EventTarget, MouseEvent, UIEvent; Chapter 19

Passed to

EventTarget.dispatchEvent( )

Returned by

Document.createEvent( )