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 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...

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy

    I've been excited to release this plugin for a long time. MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific...

  • By
    Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools

    One excellent way to add dynamism to any website is to implement a slideshow featuring images or sliding content. Of course there are numerous slideshow plugins available but many of them can be overkill if you want to do simple slideshow without controls or events.

Discussion

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