Question

I know this is bad practice. Don’t write code like this if at all possible.

Of course, we’ll always find ourselves in situations where a clever snippet of inline Javascript can address an issue quickly.

I am pursuing this query in the interest of fully understanding what happens (and the potential pitfalls) when something like this is written:

<a href="#" onclick="alert('Hi')">Click Me</a>

As far as I can tell this is functionally the same as

<script type="text/javascript">
   $(function(){ // I use jQuery in this example
       document.getElementById('click_me').onclick = 
           function () { alert('Hi'); };
   });
</script>
<a href="#" id="click_me">Click Me</a>

Extrapolating from this it seems that the string assigned to attribute onclick is inserted within an anonymous function which is assigned to the element’s click handler. Is this actually the case?

Because I’m starting to do things like this:

<a href="#" onclick="$(this).next().fadeIn(); return false;">Display my next sibling</a> <!-- Return false in handler so as not to scroll to top of page! --> 

Which works. But I don’t know how much of a hack this is. It looks suspicious because there is no apparent function that is being returned from!

You might ask, why are you doing this, Steve? Inline JS is bad practice!

Well to be quite honest I’m tired of editing three different sections of code just to modify one section of a page, especially when I’m just prototyping something to see if it will work at all. It is so much easier and sometimes even makes sense for the code specifically related to this HTML element to be defined right within the element: When I decide 2 minutes later that this was a terrible, terrible idea I can nuke the entire div (or whatever) and I don’t have a bunch of mysterious JS and CSS cruft hanging around in the rest of the page, slowing down rendering ever so slightly. This is similar to the concept of locality of reference but instead of cache misses we’re looking at bugs and code bloat.

Answer 1

You’ve got it nearly correct, but you haven’t accounted for the this value supplied to the inline code.

<a href="#" onclick="alert(this)">Click Me</a>

is actually closer to:

<a href="#" id="click_me">Click Me</a>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById('click_me').addEventListener("click", function(event) {
    (function(event) {
        alert(this);
    }).call(document.getElementById('click_me'), event);
});
</script>

Inline event handlers set this equal to the target of the event.
You can also use anonymous function in inline script

<a href="#" onclick="(function(){alert(this);})()">Click Me</a>