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I want a generic (cross browser) way to get the browser to execute the default action for an object for a specified event preferably without getting any attached listeners to fire.

This kind of question has been asked before but in the context of already being in an event, and/or strictly talking about synchronously holding off the default action before letting it happen later.

Basically, let's say you have an DOM element (you don't know which) variable, and you want to invoke a click, such that if it were an anchor, it'd follow its href, if it were an input[type="submit"] it would submit the form.
But without firing that element's listeners for the click event (which may be prone preventDefault()s in the listeners).

For those that need a reason to answer questions; you may want to do it if you're implementing something like dispatchEvent() for browsers that only have fireEvent().
Both functions return true if the default wasn't 'prevented', but only dispatchEvent() actually follows through and invokes the default.

As a side question, jQuery's trigger() is meant to do this (although after firing the listeners) and be cross-browser, maybe the solution is there? As nice as jQuery is I'd like to know the vanilla methods it is calling (if it [this particular feature] indeed works on things like IE8).

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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Hashbrown
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1 Answers1

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It appears that, at least for the click event, you can call .click() on the element in these browsers.
This will have the element enact the default (as well as calling all listeners and the .onclick value, if defined).
I don't know of any other defaults on DOM elements, would scroll need to be accounted for? Keypress? Maybe those exist as functions too, but I haven't tested.

When I did test .click(), I noticed it obeyed any of the listeners returning false and did not fire the default, and the event did bubble (a listener I had on document fired too!).

There may be no other alternative (I.e. calling the default directly, avoiding the listeners). And as for passing it an event object, the browser in question has the single global event thing going on, so maybe you can manipulate that and it wont have changed when executing .click().

Adding as I find more information in my travels :)
Furthermore, there is an doScroll() function, but I think it would be really hard to translate a given event into the string accepted by this method

Hashbrown
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