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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T09:45:14+00:00

In javascript I’d like to be able to determine the element in the html

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In javascript I’d like to be able to determine the element in the html page in which a mouse click occurs. Note that the elements will not have an event listener attached.

Basically: cursor somewhere in page, user clicks mouse, capture mouse click event, get element in which click occurred. Is this possible?

One approach I thought of is to get the x,y coords of the click event, iterate through the DOM getting the positions for each element, and finding the inner-most element which contains the click event. Sounds a bit long-winded though – so was wondering if there was another way.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    http://www.quirksmode.org is a very nice website that explains a lot about events.

    Especially for your question: Event properties – Which HTML element is the target of the event?.

    In Internet Explorer, you can get the element from the event object with event.srcElement[docs] and in all other browsers with event.target[docs].

    Also see the “Safari bug” workaround in the example I linked to (although I don’t know whether it still exist and/or in what version of Safari).

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