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

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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