gator.js - A JavaScript Library For Simple Event Delegation

Gator is a small (~0.78 kb minified + gzipped), simple, standalone, event delegation library.  If you are familiar with jQuery then it may look familiar to you.  Out of the box gator works in Chrome, Safari 5+, Firefox 3.6+, and Internet Explorer 9+. The legacy.js plugin adds support for Safari < 5, and Firefox < 3.6 and Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8.

Why Use Event Delegation?

There are already a number of articles about event delegation and the advantages over traditional event handling. Here are just a few:

improved performance/memory usage - If you have a table with hundreds of cells, and you want to do something when the user clicks on a cell, without delegation you would have to bind the event to each cell. With delegation you could bind a single click handler to the table element.

No need to re-attach events - If you use AJAX to dynamically insert/update content on the current page then you don't have to worry about removing/adding the events every time the content changes. You can bind the events once to a higher level element.

Fewer functions to manage - Without delegation you would have to manage a lot of callback functions. If you remove a bunch of elements you would have to make sure to remove all the events associated with them.

Requirements: None
Demo: http://craig.is/riding/gators
License: Apache License v2.0

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