Mastering Event Delegation in JavaScript: Simplify Your Event Handling

Learn How to Handle Events on Parent Elements Like a Pro

Max N
2 min readApr 9, 2024
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Event delegation is a powerful technique in JavaScript for handling events on parent elements, rather than attaching event handlers to individual child elements. This approach can streamline your code and improve performance, especially in situations where you have multiple elements with similar behavior.

In this guide, we’ll delve into event delegation, providing clear explanations and practical examples to help you grasp this essential concept.

Understanding Event Delegation

Event delegation works by taking advantage of event bubbling, a feature of the DOM where events triggered on child elements propagate up the DOM tree to their parent elements. By attaching event handlers to parent elements, you can capture events from multiple children with a single handler.

Practical Example

Suppose you have a list of items and you want to handle clicks on each item. Instead of attaching event handlers to each individual item, you can attach a single event handler to the parent <ul> element.

document.querySelector('ul').addEventListener('click'…

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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.