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JavaScript Interactive Web Pages with JavaScript Traversing and Manipulating the DOM with JavaScript Perfect

Why is .onclick() = "click" when using addEventListener?

In the video, he changed to using EventTarget.addEventListener() to replace .onclick but I'm not sure why is the string version of .onclick is define as "click" in the event instead of "onclick" ?

addButton.addEventListener("click", addTask);
addButton.addEventListener("click", ajaxRequest);

2 Answers

That's just the syntax of addEventListener() method. It uses "click" instead of "onclick".

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_document_addeventlistener.asp Look in the event section. It says: "Note: Do not use the "on" prefix. For example, use "click" instead of "onclick"." Previously Andrew was using: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ev_onclick.asp. Those are two different things.

Thanks! Didnt catch that one ;)

'click' is an event type, which is essentially a message.

onclick is a global event handler that listens for the 'click' event.

addEventListener('click') is a a method to register a new listener for any event type, in this case'click'.

So basically, 'onclick' is not an event type in this context. 'click' is the event type that onclick listens to.