Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / JavaScript / May 2006

What do you mean by 'textbox'?  Is that an input type text, or a
textarea?  Left-click on any of those elements does nothing by default,
you need to add an onlcick attribute for something to happen, and then
only if JavaScript is available.

Why?  There is no need to add listeners to all elements just because one
or two have them.

And your problem with that is?  If the code is short, say just calling a
function with one or two parameters, it is the most common way to do it.

You can use script to add onclick attributes, it means that users
without JavaScript don't have useless attributes in their HTML (though
it's not all that common, most prefer to just add the code to the HTML).

It means that onclick attributes probably aren't added until after the
document has loaded, so it sometimes seems inconsistent on slow loading
sites.

You can use something like:

  function someFn(){ ... }

  function initOnclicks()
  {
    if (!document.getElementById) return;

    var el;
    var idArray = ['id01','id02',...];

    for (var i=0, len=idArray.length; i<len; i++){
      el = document.getElementById(idArray[i]);

      if (el) {
        el.onclick = someFn;
      }
    }
  }

  window.onload = initOnclicks;

Or call the initClicks() function just after the last of the elements
that need an onclick has loaded.