What properties can I use with event.target?

Question

I need to identify elements from which events are fired.

Using event.target gets the respective element.

What properties can I use from there?

• href
• id
• nodeName

I cannot find a whole lot of info on it, even on the jQuery pages, so here is to hoping someone can complete the above list.

EDIT:

These may be helpful: selfHTML node properties and selfHTML HTML properties

Answer 1

If you were to inspect the event.target with firebug or chrome's developer tools you would see for a span element (e.g. the following properties) it will have whatever properties any element has. It depends what the target element is:

event.target: HTMLSpanElement  attributes: NamedNodeMap baseURI: "file:///C:/Test.html" childElementCount: 0 childNodes: NodeList[1] children: HTMLCollection[0] classList: DOMTokenList className: "" clientHeight: 36 clientLeft: 1 clientTop: 1 clientWidth: 1443 contentEditable: "inherit" dataset: DOMStringMap dir: "" draggable: false firstChild: Text firstElementChild: null hidden: false id: "" innerHTML: "click" innerText: "click" isContentEditable: false lang: "" lastChild: Text lastElementChild: null localName: "span" namespaceURI: "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" nextElementSibling: null nextSibling: null nodeName: "SPAN" nodeType: 1 nodeValue: null offsetHeight: 38 offsetLeft: 26 offsetParent: HTMLBodyElement offsetTop: 62 offsetWidth: 1445 onabort: null onbeforecopy: null onbeforecut: null onbeforepaste: null onblur: null onchange: null onclick: null oncontextmenu: null oncopy: null oncut: null ondblclick: null ondrag: null ondragend: null ondragenter: null ondragleave: null ondragover: null ondragstart: null ondrop: null onerror: null onfocus: null oninput: null oninvalid: null onkeydown: null onkeypress: null onkeyup: null onload: null onmousedown: null onmousemove: null onmouseout: null onmouseover: null onmouseup: null onmousewheel: null onpaste: null onreset: null onscroll: null onsearch: null onselect: null onselectstart: null onsubmit: null onwebkitfullscreenchange: null outerHTML: "<span>click</span>" outerText: "click" ownerDocument: HTMLDocument parentElement: HTMLElement parentNode: HTMLElement prefix: null previousElementSibling: null previousSibling: null scrollHeight: 36 scrollLeft: 0 scrollTop: 0 scrollWidth: 1443 spellcheck: true style: CSSStyleDeclaration tabIndex: -1 tagName: "SPAN" textContent: "click" title: "" webkitdropzone: "" __proto__: HTMLSpanElement 

Answer 2

event.target returns the DOM element, so you can retrieve any property/ attribute that has a value; so, to answer your question more specifically, you will always be able to retrieve nodeName, and you can retrieve href and id, provided the element has a href and id defined; otherwise undefined will be returned.

However, inside an event handler, you can use this, which is set to the DOM element as well; much easier.

$('foo').bind('click', function () {     // inside here, `this` will refer to the foo that was clicked });