Detect background click in jQuery

Question

Say I have the following HTML:

<div>
  <span>span text</span> div text <span>some more text</span>
</div>

I want to make it so that when I click on span, it will trigger some event (e.g. to make the text bold), that's easy:

$('span').click( ... )

But now I when I click away from the element, I want another event to trigger (e.g. to make the text normal weight). I need to detect, somehow, a click not inside the span element. This is very similar to the blur() event, but for non INPUT elements. I don't mind if this click is only detected inside the DIV element and not the entire BODY of the page, btw.

I tried to get an event to trigger in non-SPAN elements with the following:

$('div').click( ... ) // triggers in the span element
$('div').not('span').click( ... ) // still triggers in the span element
$('div').add('span').click( ... ) // triggers first from span, then div

Another solution would be to read the event's target inside the click event. Here's an example of implementing it this way:

$('div').click(function(e) {
  if (e.target.nodeName != "span")
     ...
});

I was wondering if there was a more elegant solution like blur() though.

Answer 1

From what I've researched, I think the stopPropagation function is most appropriate. For example:

$("#something_clickable a").click(function(e) {
   e.stopPropagation();
})

See How do I prevent a parent's onclick event from firing when a child anchor is clicked? for a similar question.

Answer 2

Your last method should work best even if it's messy. Here's a little refinement:

$('span').click(function() {
    var span = $(this);
    // Mark the span active somehow (you could use .data() instead)
    span.addClass('span-active');

    $('div').click(function(e) {
        // If the click was not inside the active span
        if(!$(e.target).hasClass('span-active')) {
            span.removeClass('span-active');
            // Remove the bind as it will be bound again on the next span click
            $('div').unbind('click');
        }
    });
});

It's not clean, but it should work. No unnecessary binds and this should be foolproof (no false positives etc).