JS (or mootools if preferred) did mouse exit to another element? - javascript

Okay, so, I have a bit of a strange situation which I have encountered multiple times. I'm looking for a simple/the best solution, NOT the overcomplicated solution I used before (and have since forgotten).
You see, I have a slideshow. I also have a couple of buttons that float on top of the slide show (visible here: http://marsxplr.com/view-13378)
Now, I have these buttons appear when the user's mouse goes over the slideshow. However, the minute the user's mouse goes over the buttons, mouseleave is called (even though the mouse is still technically over the slideshow!). This causes the buttons to disappear whenever the mouse goes over them, which is obviously not something I would like to happen.
I solved this by then making each button re-show its self whenever it receives a mouseover.
But now, we have a problem...
The button is on the very edge of the slideshow. That means that when mouseleave is called, one of two things happened:
A:The mouse went off of the button but not off of the slideshow, and mouseEnter got called on the slideshow meaning that no action should be taken because slideshow will eventually take care of hiding the button in its mouseleave.
B: The mouse simply left the slideshow and button altogether meaning that we should HIDE the button!
So my question is, how do I tell the difference between these two possibilities? Yes, yes, one solution would be to just always make the button hide its self -- and rely on the slideshow re-showing the button... But I am worried that the slideshow onmouseenter will be called BEFORE the button onmouseleave on certain browsers! This could cause issues as you can probably tell. In fact, thinking about this, I am already susceptible to this. For instance, if the mouse goes from the slideshow to the button, and the onmouseleave for my slideshow is called AFTER the onmousleave causing the button to still dissapear...
So, long story short, I need to know one of these two things:
Is there a guaranteed order in which these events are called?
Or is there a way to tell where the mouse actually WENT when mouseleave is called?
As you can see in my example above, I am using mootools, so a mootools solution is fine. It would, however, be interesting to see a vanilla-js solution as well.
EDIT:
My buttons are floated and on a separate z-index, so the standard operation for a parent-child DOM relationship does not occur

No such problem with standard DOM events.
As for the order, it bubbles from the deepest elements up to the document root.
There's also an optional (see the false param in the code below) capture phase, when the order is reversed. From the root to each inner element under the cursor (for mouse events).
To check on which inner element of the original element the event actually occurred, you can inspect the target property of the event object:
el.addEventListener('mouseout', function (e) {
var target = e.target;
if (target.classList.contains('whatever')) {
// Do something
}
}, false);
As per Georges Oates Larsen's comment, there's also relatedTarget, designed specifically for events involving several elements.

Related

Nondeterministic jQuery .toggle() How to prevent this fluky behaviour?

Using jQ the .toggle() behaviour seems to depend on the location of the client mouse pointer at the time of page load events. And that, in terms of reliable (Turin like) behaviour, is totally useless!!
For example hovering over an iframe video while the page loads inverts the toggle state. Each subsequent hover event has the reverse effect, hiding instead of
$("iframe").hover(function () {
$('#sliderContainer').fadeToggle();
});
Initially I searched to find some mitigation. Am I correct to conclude that at some timepoint there will always be a risk of hover-toggle becoming inverted?
Also I've read in SO that .toggle has been deprecated, but don't see any indication of that on jQ's website. What's going on there?
I still found .toggle to be non-deterministic with mouseenter and mouseleave.
Those mouse events do work with display:none and display: block, with the provision that when the mouse is over the 'toggle' area for the time during page load, then the mouse has to leave the area and trigger the mouseenter event.
At least that is expected and dependable behaviour! Then animation has to be added.

mouseover fires inadvertently for image on layout change

I have a number of images in my HTML document.
The user triggers some changes (AJAX calls) when clicking on an image or by pressing a key.
To keep track of the latest image (client-side), I use javascript and onmouseover, assigning the image ID to a javascript-variable which in turn is used to fill the AJAX calls.
Everything works well (even it there might be better ways to do it), but sometimes it takes some time to refresh the image. For a moment, it ceases to exist, causing the image next to it to jump left.
This, of course, moves that image underneath the pointer, triggering the mouseover event.
How(?) is it possible to distinguish between a mouseover event caused by mouse-movement from one fired by a layout change?
The short answer is you can't really tell what caused a mouseover event, other than the cursor moved over a new DOM element (or some other things, like a tap on a touch device). A layout change is just something that happens independent of this event.
One possible solution to your actual problem is to avoid the problem altogether by preventing the layout jump. For example, you could use a placeholder element to fill the space while the next image loads.
Alternately, your logic could almost-certainly be made more-robust so as not to depend on something as fragile as this.

mousemove event is triggered onscroll even when mouse was not moved on Chrome

I was trying to answer an issue with custom drop down, but challenged by an inconsistent behavior in Chrome and Firefox.
DEMO: http://jsfiddle.net/fyeht/ [Added scroll event for more clarity]
See below image, The list items can be navigated using arrow keys.
To Reproduce the issue:
Open console in Chrome (F12)
Click on an item in the list (you would notice some events getting logged in the console)
Use down arrow key to navigate to the next item in the list
Finally, the issue is noticed when you reach the last item in the view and hitting down arrow would scroll. Check the log to see 'scroll', 'mouse enter' and 'mouse move' [check the new demo]
The issue is after reaching the end of items in view, it scrolls. Even though the mouse is untouched, it triggers mouseenter and mousemove events in Chrome. In FF, on scroll it triggers just the mouseenter which make sense.
Question(s):
Why is mousemove triggered when mouse is untouched?
Is this just browser inconsistency? Could not find documentation on events triggered when scrolling? (never knew it did)
Submitted a bug report: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=241476
In your example, I see that both Chrome and FF are firing mouseenter DOM events whenever the mouse is left hovering over the <ul> and pressing the key down triggers the browser to scroll in order to bring the selected <li> into view.
However, only Chrome is additionally triggering mousemove events. One obvious difference already in the mouseenter event objects that the two throw is that for Chrome, MouseEvent.offsetX and MouseEvent.offsetY values are included, whereas in FF these properties are undefined. So, when that enter is triggered Chrome has already decided the mouse "has moved".
Since the MouseEvent.screenX and MouseEvent.screenY event context values do not change between scroll-triggered MouseEvent instances, one could perhaps distinguish between an "artificial" mouseenter / mousemove event and an "authentic" one by storing these values from prior events.
DOM Event Specification
The DOM Level 2 Event Specification for mousemove reads:
The mousemove event occurs when the pointing device is moved while it is over an element.
The Level 3 spec (working draft) is essentially the same:
A user agent must dispatch this event when a pointing device is moved while it is over an element.
Seems like it could down to whether one interprets "is moved" relatively or not.
Also, in the section of the Level 3 spec on mouse event order, it states that when a pointer is moved into an element, it triggers mouseover, mouseenter, and mousemove, in that order. Every case that is specified there always has those three together, so perhaps one might interpret it that if you are going to trigger the mouseenter event, you should also be triggering the mousemove event which corresponds to entering the element.
This is a nice demo.
In Chrome mouse movement for elements is definitely relative. In chrome I can get keydown and scroll events only if the mouse pointer is over the scroll bar. I can also get scroll only events if i use the wheel to scroll and leave the mouse over the scroll bar. It is and isn't very odd that scroll by dragging causes "mouse move", and "mouse over" events.
Not only are mouse move and mouse over events produced in profusion by the browser they are not a very good indication of a users intent. Infact these events are a useful entropy source.
To the degree that there are some minor differences this is in the context of how useful these "micro events" are individually. To work with them you must devise a way to filter them for user intention you want to link to higher level actions. Any reasonable method you choose to make sense of these events will probably detect these move - on scroll events as garbage. This is where your point is really worth noting and taking under consternation.
A first stage would be to Filter out events based on the elements and values of coordinates. It might help to create a state machine model. You might register and registered handlers in response to other events. You've identified this case where you'd want to change responsive state if or reaction criteria if a key element has a scroll bar. IF an element or it's parent has a vertical scroll bar throw out mouse moves with relatively high X values.
You might want to also ignore mouse overs if it's fired with a mouse move in that context. It starts to become impractical to handle each of these micro event one at a time even if you are changing state by registering or deregistering handlers. More information can be extracted by creating an event sequence fifo buffer.
Register event handlers to add a new event to the buffer. You might also want to collect information from timer events in this buffer to establish more context. You might create an object that keeps a fifo in an array. This would be like a queue but not in the sense of it being a place where the events are waiting to be processed. Instead your program is waiting to calculate patterns in the buffer and based on the patterns fire higher level events, accept or reject different types of events and extend, contract or save the contents of the buffer. You can then evaluate move events for changes in x and y and also create conditions given the patter of scroll mouse over and mouse move events you've demonstrated.
I really doubt there's a browser inconsistency here. You should create a mousemove event that prints out the x and y coordinate. You'll probably see that the mouse has indeed moved a little bit. If that's the case, try using the plugin hoverIntent to eliminate issues like this.
EDIT:
Using the up and down arrow keys, I'm now able to replicate the issue. Yeah, it sure looks like some kind of bug! I bet the mousemove coordinate delta is tiny. Maybe the cursor moves one or two pixels? I would say, to overcome this, add a check to the mousemove function that compares previous mousemove's x-y coordinates to the current mousemove's x-y coordinates. Determine if it's more than just a few pixels. If so, you know it's a real mousemove. If it's less, you can chalk that up as a chrome bug.
FURTHER EDIT:
It seems like you uncovered a bug where mousemove is being fired in chrome when it probably shouldn't be. There may be workarounds that you could figure out if you hack it enough. But the best solution might be just to avoid using mousemove in this situation. In general, mousemove is one of those expensive events that should be used only when you really need it.
This is not a bug. The mousemove is relative to element that the event is attached to. In your case, you see that your mouse is not moving because you took the browser window as the reference. But for that scrolling list, whenever the list is scrolled, the mouse pointing over some element of the list moved to over different element
Imagine that you as the Earth, a cup of coffee stand still on a table as the mouse, the scrollable list as the Sun : if you (window) don't move, the position of the cup of coffee (mouse) is at the same place for you; but for the Sun (list), it will see that the Earth and the cup of coffee are both moving.

Trigger onMouseOver when mouse pointer already is over after page load

I have several pages that are all very similar. They have some javascript rollover links (images are preloaded, then there is a onMouseOver event that calls an image swap function and finally, there is a onMouseOut event that restores the original image).
When the user clicks on a rollover link that points to another page that has a rollover link on the exact same position, the image on the new page would be expected to load on the "over" state. This is not the case in Chrome and Safari (IE and Firefox work as expected).
So... On page load, is there a way to check if the mouse is already hovering the image to swap it right away? Something like "OnMouseAlreadyOver"?
Thank you.
If you using jQuery, it works without any problems!
http://jsfiddle.net/beuae
(not only for buttons, for divs also)
Actually, jQuery is a very good framework which assures everything goes as you expect, and cross-browser. This example confirms it.
The W3C standard says
onmouseover = script [CT]
The onmouseover event occurs when the pointing device is moved onto an element. This attribute may be used with most elements.
onmousemove = script [CT]
The onmousemove event occurs when the pointing device is moved while it is over an element. This attribute may be used with most elements.
mouseover is fired on moving over the boundary of the object. mousemove happens when the mouse is already over the element.
You may need to use onmousemove (or even both).
You may need to actually do the calculation based on the element position and the mouse cursor position.
//Get Mouse Position
document.onmousemove=getMouseCoordinates;
function getMouseCoordinates(event){
ev = event || window.event;
mouseX = ev.pageX;
mouseY = ev.pageY;
}
You can't without passing a variable to the other page or using cookies to track which was hovered (and that will fail over if people do change their mouse position)
In theory you could check the mouse position and the button position however there is no way to get the mouse position unless an event is triggered, so the mouse has to move and if it move the CSS :hover should get triggered.
It's a minor issue tho, I doubt most people are going to click a link, wait for the next page and then expect that link to be hovered and ready to click again (why wouldn't anyone one to keep clicking the same button unless it does different things)
From a UX point of view I wonder if webkit doesn't have the best approach here, why port the action of one page to another.
You can use document.getElementFromPoint(mouseX, mouseY) to get the element, but the only way to get the cursor's position is via an event. The problem is, the only events are clicks and mouse movements, which require user input from the beginning, which is what you're trying to avoid.
In short, no, it's not possible to do with JavaScript. You're left with using CSS.

javascript mouseover while dragging

I'm trying to implement a drag and drop script and have hit the wall with one problem. When you take an item and start dragging it - the item is directly below your cursor and onmouseover event is very rarely fired on the items below. But i want other items to highlight when i drag something over them. One of the solutions would be not to drag anything at all - that way the mouse events would work, but that would look ugly. Has anyone ever done something like this and know how to overcome this problem?
If you're thinking about suggesting some JQuery plugin or something like that - please don't. I don't need a completed solution, this is educational.
IMO, in order to have the mouseover event to be fired up frequently would be binding the mouseover event to the parent element of all the affected elements, or perhaps to the document itself, since events get bubbled up, they are probably the only elements that can fire the mouseover events.
Then further, write a hit method in your mouseover event and actively check the position of your mouse cursor, see whether it's going under the target element's boundary. Tradeoff in usability and performance. You choose.
My 2cents.
Or perhaps, you can reverse engineer jQuery UI to see how they implement the drag element. Haven't check thou, but I think there should be a wiser way.

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