Anne van Kesteren

DOM Core gains an Events chapter

While travelling and at home I have added a major new old feature to DOM Core: a definition of the events model. Indeed, aside from that Web DOM Core (see history notes) was renamed to DOM Core.

Many thanks to zewt on the WHATWG IRC channel for carefully reviewing my rewrite from scratch of the "DOM Event Architecture" and "Basic Event Interfaces" chapters of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification. I think this is the first time I am really quite pleased with my initial draft of a feature and feedback thus far on the content has been positive. Nevertheless, if you find it terrible I would really like to know.

These are the reasons why I think the event architecture belongs in DOM Core:

• createEvent() sits on the Document object.
• Mutation events are best defined by the methods that dispatch them. There is still hope mutation events can be replaced by a different model, but if that fails, they belong in DOM Core. Their replacement (or refinement) might too.
• Several people want all event targets to inherit from EventTarget. This includes Node.
• Both the event and document model depend on an abstract tree concept.
• They also share the INVALID_STATE_ERR exception as currently defined.
• The event architecture should be separate from specific type of events, such as mouse or keyboard events.