Cross-browser event listener with design patterns
A lot of the power of JavaScript comes from the ability to be an event-driven language. Dealing with event listeners is not a simple task considering different implementations by Internet Explorer and the rest of the world. After some searching on internet you have probably found some cross-browser solutions, although they are not always as efficient as it possibly could.
I’ll present some of them and explain their design pros and cons. All them do exactly the same, attach actions to events, none of them does browser sniffing to determine which event attachment technique to use, they use feature detection instead. For clarity sake, browser sniffing is a common technique on which an application tries to find out the user’s browser, usually by examining the useragent string looking for vendor/version and is a common source of detection problems. On the other hand, feature detection is a much safer technique where the application checks if a certain feature (function, property) exists (is implemented) in the browser and once this feature is defined, use it, otherwise another feature is checked as a fallback.
Some design patterns presented here are well covered in Ross Harmes & Dustin Diaz’s Pro JavaScript Design Patterns book.
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