Question

I have a div as a trigger for some jQuery. The div contains a link. Sometimes clicking the div will also mean clicking the link and I need to stop the link’s behaviour.

I believe this can be done with event.preventDefault(); but the following doesn’t work in IE8. Im assuming this is because the trigger is a parent div not the actual link, but how do I fix this? Thanks

$('div#myDiv').click(function(){
    event.preventDefault();
    //other js here
});


<div id="myDiv">
   <a href="#">Link</a>
</div>

Answer 1

You didn’t define the parameter:

$('div#myDiv').click(function(e){
    e.preventDefault();
    //other js here
});

.preventDefault is a jQuery shim in the jQuery event object. It doesn’t exist in the IE event object.

Chrome and IE define a global event object which refers to the native event object in those browsers. For this reason, always use e ev evt etc so you don’t accidentally refer to this global event object as it won’t get the jQuery bug fixes and normalizations.

Documentation: http://api.jquery.com/category/events/event-object/