Greg Reimer's Weblog: Web Technologist for Sun.COM Web Design

I decided that mouseover/out is never the behavior I want, whereas mouseenter/leave is always the behavior I want. Practically always. So I've changed over reglib's reg.hover() to behave like mouseenter/leave.

For Example

Say you have this HTML structure:

<div>
  <p>
    <span>
      <a>
        mouse over me
      </a>
    </span>
  </p>
</div>

Which I tend to visualize as a ziggurat-like object:

...and then you have this event handler:

// note, the think() function is purely fanciful

reg.hover('div',function(e){
    think(e.type, e.target);
},function(e){
    think(e.type, e.target);
});

Up until now, reglib behaved like a typical mouseover/out event handler, which in a nested element/bubbling situation isn't what you really want. The mouse movement is represented by the little arrow:

So anyways, as I said, this is a bit wonky and unnecessary. Therefore the next version of reglib will (if all goes to plan) behave thusly:

The title of this post is a bit misleading. The mouseenter/leave events are never used. It's all still accomplished via mouseover/out, but there's enough information available in the handling element, event.target and event.relatedTarget elements--and their positions relative to each other--to know whether to execute the handler. Since the actual mouseenter/leave events don't bubble, and in any case are IE-only, reglib wants nothing to do with them. This code is checked in to the trunk, and with a little more testing will be released as reglib version 1.0.5.

One thing also, I'd be curious to know if anybody knows of a reason this would be *undesirable* behavior.

For more info: see all reglib posts, grab the reglib feed, reglib on google code