Mastering Event Capturing in the DOM Tree

Unravel the mysteries behind event handling and enhance your coding expertise.

Max N
2 min readApr 10, 2024
Photo by niko photos on Unsplash

Ever pondered how clicks and other user interactions travel from the root of a page all the way to the targeted element? That journey unfolds thanks to event capturing — a crucial concept in JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM). Join us as we delve deeper into this powerful feature and level up your programming prowess.

The Essence of Event Capturing

As users interact with websites or apps, events ripple across the DOM hierarchy. These cascading actions comprise three stages: capture, target, and bubble. We focus here on the initial stage, which propels events downwards toward the intended DOM nodes.

Imagine an actual domino effect, where energy originates at the starting point (root), flows down a line, and finally impacts the desired piece (target). Similarly, event capturing initiates at the highest level, gradually moving towards lower-level nodes until it encounters the designated recipient.

Let’s observe this phenomenon in action via JavaScript snippets.

Demonstrating Event Capturing with Code Examples

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Max N

A writer that writes about JavaScript and Python to beginners. If you find my articles helpful, feel free to follow.