MooTools Event Delegation
One feature I heard Moo developers hinting at was the future addition of event delegation to the MooTools JavaScript library. MooTools Core Developer, Aaron Newton, wrote a post today about a plugin he's created that does just that.
From the article:
Event delegation is a common practice where by you attach an event listener to a parent object to monitor its children rather than attach events to all the children. It's far more efficient when you have numerous items on a page that you want to interact with.
I don't know of any concrete plans to incorporate this functionality into MooTools 1.3 but I assume they will. I strongly suggest MooTools developers read Aaron's article at Clientcide. I also recommend this article for jQuery users as John Resig recently boasted of this addition to jQuery.
Exciting times in the framework world!
John Resig, boasting!? GASP!
Thanks for the news David! … I’ve never been a fan of delegated events/event handlers – do they even bubble/propogate?
Let me add that event delegation is awesome when you’re continually adding DOM elements, perhaps via Ajax… I’m just not sure the performance benefits are as they seem.
@James: I didn’t mean “boasted” in a bad way. It’s an awesome addition which should be boasted. You can find the answer to your question here:
http://groups.google.com/group/mootools-users/browse_thread/thread/bbaf247948273868/db6a33205b71c89b?show_docid=db6a33205b71c89b
James, believe me with even a couple hundred elements you can see a big difference. It takes a few more elements to make a browser like Chrome slow up, but IE folks will see the difference on smaller numbers of events like night and day.