Question

I thought jQuery’s click() can let us add a handler or just click on an element?

However, I tried:

$(function() {
    setTimeout(function() {
        $('a').first().trigger('click'); // or click(), the same
    }, 3000);
});

and waited 3 seconds and it won’t click on the first <a> element in the page… how come?

Update: this is related to What is the best way to make the Yahoo media player autostart, jQuery? and so there should already be event handler for clicking on a media, so how come .click(), which is the same as trigger('click'), not firing off that event handler?

Answer 1

Calling the click() method does not simulate clicking the link. It calls any click() handlers on the affected element(s). That’s a subtle yet important difference. If you want to simulate clicking the link, there is no realiable cross-browser way of doing this.