The Book of Ryan

This page features some very basic tests of DOM event registration and cancelling the popagation of events using the traditional event model, W3C DOM Level 2 and Microsoft stuff. The results aren’t very suprising, but will hopefully serve as a good reference.

These tests were conducted in the most current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari1, OmniWeb and Opera. Descriptions of the tests, as well as live test are available here.

Stopping Events set with DOM Traditonal Event Registraton

• function(e) {}
• function(e) {e.preventDefault();}
• function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}
• function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}
• function() {return false;}

Results

Function	Internet Explorer 6	Firefox 1.5.4	Safari 2.0.2	OmniWeb 5.5b4	Opera 9.01
function(e) {e.preventDefault();}	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
function() {return false;}	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Stopping Events set with W3C DOM Level 2 Event Registraton

• function(e) {}
• function(e) {e.preventDefault();}
• function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}
• function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}
• function() {return false;}

Results

Function	Internet Explorer 6	Firefox 1.5.4	Safari 2.0.2	OmniWeb 5.5b4	Opera 9.01
function(e) {e.preventDefault();}	No Event	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}	No Event	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}	No Event	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
function() {return false;}	No Event	No	No	No	No

Stopping Events set with Microsoft Proprietary Event Registraton

• function(e) {}
• function(e) {e.preventDefault();}
• function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}
• function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}
• function() {return false;}

Results

Function	Internet Explorer 6	Firefox 1.5.4	Safari 2.0.2	OmniWeb 5.5b4	Opera 9.01
function(e) {e.preventDefault();}	No	No Event	No Event	No Event	Yes
function() {window.event.returnValue=false;}	Yes	No Event	No Event	No Event	Yes
function(e) {e.returnValue=false;}	Yes	No Event	No Event	No Event	Yes
function() {return false;}	Yes	No Event	No Event	No Event	No

Note: Safari fails the control test for these events, by not changing the fragment section of the URL after the event fires. In order to test with Safari, the links were altered to a slightly more cumbersome href="/test-#-failed". ↩