onInput Event

By  on  

Coding HTML forms has been painful my entire career. Form controls look different between operating systems and browsers, coding client side and server side validation is a nightmare, and inevitably you forget something somewhere along the line. Some behaviors don't act the way you'd hope, like onChange, which only fires when the user leaves (blurs) a given form controls. Enter the onInputevent, which changes upon keystroke, paste, etc.

// Try it here:  https://codepen.io/darkwing/pen/KKmBNvg
myInput.addEventListener('input', e => {
  console.log(e.target.value);
});

These days it seems like the old onChange behavior isn't useful -- we always want to react to any user input. onInput also fires on elements with contenteditable and designmode attributes. Most modern JavaScript libraries like React treat onChange like onInput, so it's as though onChange has lost its use!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Wookmark

    The first thing that hits you when you visit Pinterest is "Whoa, the columns are the same width and the photos are cut to fit just the way they should."  Basic web users probably think nothing of it but as a developer, I can appreciate the...

  • By
    CSS Kwicks

    One of the effects that made me excited about client side and JavaScript was the Kwicks effect.  Take a list of items and react to them accordingly when hovered.  Simple, sweet.  The effect was originally created with JavaScript but come five years later, our...

Discussion

  1. Thomas

    I agree that onInput is very handy, but I beg to differ on the point that there is no more use for onChange. E.g. in this tutorial for creating a custom audio player: https://css-tricks.com/lets-create-a-custom-audio-player/#play-pause There, the onChange event is used for a range input element to seek to a passage in an audio file. While playing the audio, you might not want the current position in the audio to change on every input, but only after having finished seeking the correct passage.

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