Mouse events in firefox (REALLY)

[xoggoth]

Trying to convert some interactives in IE to work in FF but problems with mouse events. According to various sources on net onmousedown= or onclick= in Firefox automatically passes the mouse event as 1st argument of the function, then you can or it with the global event to get something you can use in IE or Firefox eg:

jscript:
function gete(e)
{
ev = e || window.event;
etc.
}

HTML:
<span id=holly onclick=gete()>etc.

This does not work, e is reported as having no properties and if gete has explicit arguments you get same passed in IE as Firefox, this event argument that FF is supposed to pass does not exist. I don't find examples from the net work either.

mousemove does seem to work as stated so I could store last value obtained in that but it seems messy. Any other ideas?

Cheers

[NickFitz]

Trying to convert some interactives in IE to work in FF but problems with mouse events. According to various sources on net onmousedown= or onclick= in Firefox automatically passes the mouse event as 1st argument of the function, then you can or it with the global event to get something you can use in IE or Firefox eg:

jscript:
function gete(e)
{
ev = e || window.event;
etc.
}

HTML:
<span id=holly onclick=gete()>etc.

This does not work, e is reported as having no properties and if gete has explicit arguments you get same passed in IE as Firefox, this event argument that FF is supposed to pass does not exist. I don't find examples from the net work either.

mousemove does seem to work as stated so I could store last value obtained in that but it seems messy. Any other ideas?

Cheers

The event object is indeed passed as the first argument to (e.g.) your onmouseover handler, but that handler is then invoking another function and not passing it along. Basically, when you use inline event handlers, rather than attaching events, the event handler is created as an anonymous function. If you then want to call another function, you have to pass the first parameter along to it.

So, where you have

<div onmouseover="ton(this)">blah</div>

the onmouseover attribute has a value which is a function object:

function onmouseover(event) { 
   ton(this); 
}

and the "event" parameter isn't being used. Change it to

<div onmouseover="ton(event, this)">blah</div>

and change your function to

function ton(e, that) {
   var ev = e || window.event;
   // do stuff with "that"
}

and it should work.

BTW this isn't a Firefox thing; IE also does the anonymous function thing internally, but because it doesn't pass any arguments, it isn't always apparent. You can see this if you go to http://www.gatekeeperel.co.uk/intera.../keyyesno.html and then type

javascript:alert(document.getElementById("scroll").onmouseover)

[NickFitz]

Actually, I've just noticed that

<div onmouseover="ton(event, this)">blah</div>

will, on IE, find the global event property of window and pass that along on IE, so rendering the first line of the function redundant.

However, I'm not certain what would happen on Opera, Safari or Chrome: it might be better to use

<div onmouseover="ton(arguments[0], this)">blah</div>

to be on the safe side.

[xoggoth]

Thanks again nick, that works, on to the next problem!