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
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WordPress-Style Comment Controls Using MooTools or jQuery

    WordPress has a nice little effect on the Admin Dashboard where it shows and hides the comment control links when you mouseover and mouseout of the record's container. Here's how to achieve that effect using MooTools or jQuery. The XHTML Notice that we place the links into...

  • By
    WebSocket and Socket.IO

    My favorite web technology is quickly becoming the WebSocket API. WebSocket provides a welcomed alternative to the AJAX technologies we've been making use of over the past few years. This new API provides a method to push messages from client to server efficiently...

Discussion

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