Document.elementFromPoint

By  on  

Reacting to events with JavaScript is the foundation of a dynamic experiences on the web. Whether it's a click event or another typical action, responding to that action is important. We started with assigning events to specific elements, then moved to event delegation for efficiency, but did you know you can identify elements by position on the page? Let's look at document.elementFromPoint and document.elementsFromPoint.

The document.elementFromPoint method accepts x and y parameters to identify the top-most element at a point:

const element = document.elementFromPoint(100, 100);
// 

If you want to know the entire element stack, you can use document.elementsFromPoint:

const elements = document.elementsFromPoint(100, 100);
// [
, , ]

The elementFromPoint and elementsFromPoint are really helpful for experiences where developers don't want to assign individual events. Games and entertainment sites could benefit from these functions. How would you use them?

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using Dojo

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with Dojo JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!