Comments on: Event Delegation for MooTools

By: MooTools Event Delegation | Castup

MooTools Event Delegation | Castup — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:37:33 +0000

[...] this functionality into MooTools 1.3 but I assume they will. I strongly suggest MooTools developers read Aaron’s article at Clientcide. I also recommend this article for jQuery users as John Resig recently boasted of this addition to [...]

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:50:04 +0000

That’s not really accurate Sean. If you call a method on what $$ returns (an array) it basically handles the looping for you. So your example above in your comment is the same thing as my first example. You’re still looping over all the anchors in the document and adding an event to each. Further, if you were to chain this you would actually loop through it more than once. I.e. this is bad:

$$('a').addEvent(...).setStyle(...)

The above code would loop through all the links twice.

Further, this doesn’t accomplish the same goals. You aren’t delegating the event to a parent but rather attaching an event to each item, which is precisely what delegation helps you avoid.

By: Sean McArthur

Sean McArthur — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:43:40 +0000

Just wanted to point out that Mootools kind of does this for you. Or well, it doesn’t delegate probably in the same way you do. I haven’t popped the hood yet.

But you’re example can be done without looping through each element:

$$('a').addEvent('click', function() { console.log('poop'); });

The addEvent function also works for element collections and will add the event to every element in the collection.