Question

I just found out that jQuery 1.7 introduced a new method, on(). With my brief study, I see it as a consolidated way to bind events, as opposed to decide which one of bind(), live(), and delegate() to use. IMO, this is a really nice addition that offers numerous benefits. But then I am not sure if I need to convert event shortcuts, such as click(). According to the official document, the definition of click() is still the shortcut to .bind('click', handler). I thought it would make more sense for the jQuery developers to redefine click() and other event shortcuts in v1.7+ to use on(), no?

Answer 1

jQuery documentation is clearly presenting .click() as a shorthand of .on("click"), so I guess you can replace all your previous calls, if you want.

Extract of the on() method documentation:

There are shorthand methods for some events such as .click() that can be used to attach or trigger event handlers. For a complete list of shorthand methods, see the events category.

The method .on() actually does the same as .bind() except that you can bind multiple events at once, and select a set of children that actually fire this event.

I don’t think it makes more sense to use on() instead of click() unless you need to bind multiple events or do some more tricky stuff with filtering children.