Prototype’s Element.on with MooTools

By  on  

Prototype 1.7RC1 was released on Monday. While the big news with this release appears to be the implementation of John Resig's Sizzle selector engine, what caught my eye was the new on method. This new Element.on method is very similar to Prototype's Element.observe method but with a few enhancements (event relaying, event stop). While I don't necessarily care about the enhancements, I simply love that the event method is called "on." Using "on" as the method name makes it sound more like the event itself. Here's how easy it is to use "on" instead of "addEvent" for your events.

The MooTools JavaScript

/* the directive */
Element.alias('addEvent','on');

/* the usage */
$('myElement').on('click',fn);

Using on instead of addEvent is as easy as a quick MooTools Element.alias directive.

It's weird that I like "on" so much considering a generally don't like jQuery's css and attr methods. Oh well. Congrats to the Prototype team for their impending release.

Recent Features

  • 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...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Speech Recognition

    Speech recognition software is becoming more and more important; it started (for me) with Siri on iOS, then Amazon's Echo, then my new Apple TV, and so on.  Speech recognition is so useful for not just us tech superstars but for people who either want to work "hands...

  • By
    Telephone Link Protocol

    We've always been able to create links with protocols other than the usual HTTP, like mailto, skype, irc ,and more;  they're an excellent convenience to visitors.  With mobile phone browsers having become infinitely more usable, we can now extend that convenience to phone numbers: The tel...

Discussion

  1. Lorenzo S.

    Hi David. Nice idea. I like also css() and other jQuery methods’ name (for their simplicity), but I prefer Mootools core. So, why not:

    Element.alias('addEvent','on'); 
    Element.implement({
      'css': function(p, v) {
        if (v == undefined) return this.getStyle(p);
        else return this.setStyle(p, v);
      },
      'attr': function(a, v) {
        if (v == undefined) return this.getProperty(a);
        else return this.setProperty(a, v);
      },
      'html': function(h) {
        if (h == undefined) return this.get('html');
        else return this.set('html', h);
    });
    

    What do you think?

  2. @Lorenzo S.: I’ve done posts like that in the past. I can’t stand .css and .attr for MooTools, but what you have would work.

  3. Arian

    @Lorenzo S.: If you want jQuery syntax in MooTools, have a look at this repository: http://github.com/cheeaun/mooj/blob/master/mooj.js

  4. Nikolaj

    @David

    Fully agree with “on” seems acceptable, whereas .css, .attr etc. doesn’t :)

    I guess the reason you might like “on” – when not other jQuery shortcuts – might be due to we’re used to “on” in “onClick” etc. for regular JavaScript, which probably makes the mind having positive thoughts.

  5. Great advice, thanks a lot.

    However, how much slower will this be? I mean, will on() trigger addEvent() and that in turn will trigger whatever internal functions are used?

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