How many elements does it take for event delegation to become worthwhile?

Question

Reading another Stack Overflow question about jQuery performance, I started thinking about the point when it becomes worth using event delegation rather than binding to elements individually. I was thinking mainly about jQuery, but I suppose it is probably applicable for Javascript in general.

Event delegation has two main purposes:

1. allowing handlers to work on elements that have not yet been created/inserted into the DOM.
2. binding one function to a common ancestor element rather than to multiple sibling elements

My question is about the second of these. The general answer will probably be "it depends on the exact situation", but I wonder if there is a rule of thumb or a way of benchmarking in order to test this.

So, the question is: how many elements do you need before the performance benefits of event delegation outweigh the performance costs?

Answer 1

Assuming this HTML structure:

<ul id="navUL">
    <li><a href="one.html">One</a></li>
    <li><a href="two.html">Two</a></li>
    <li><a href="three.html">Three</a></li>
</ul>

Just to clear things up (for me) .... According to jQuery docs ( http://api.jquery.com/delegate/ ), this:

$("#navUL").delegate("a", "click", function(){
    // anchor clicked
});  

... is equivalent to this:

$("#navUL").each(function(){
    $("a", this).live("click", function(){
        // anchor clicked
    });
}); 

---

However, event delegation (as I know it) is this:

$("#navUL").click(function(e) {
    if (e.target.nodeName !== "A") { return false; }
    // anchor clicked
    // anchor is referenced by e.target
});  

So you catch the click event on the UL element, and then figure out which anchor was actually clicked via the event.target property.

I don't know about the delegate() method, but this last technique should always be faster than attaching event handlers to each anchor in the #navUL element, like so:

$("#navUL a").click(function() {
    // anchor clicked
    // anchor is referenced by the this value
});