What's the theory behind jQuery keypress, keydown, keyup black magic (on Macs)? [closed]

Answer 1

This article is a good resource explaining the differences between keyup, keydown and keypress.

The short answer is there is no easy way to handle them other than to account for the different browsers.

The way I personally handle it in a Bootstrap plugin I wrote is by creating a custom method to check which event is supported. Coincidentally a very similar method showed up in the official Bootstrap version a little while later :P

//------------------------------------------------------------------
//
//  Check if an event is supported by the browser eg. 'keypress'
//  * This was included to handle the "exhaustive deprecation" of jQuery.browser in jQuery 1.8
//
eventSupported: function(eventName) {         
    var isSupported = (eventName in this.$element);

    if (!isSupported) {
      this.$element.setAttribute(eventName, 'return;');
      isSupported = typeof this.$element[eventName] === 'function';
    }

    return isSupported;
}

Later on I use it in my code to attach event handlers:

if (this.eventSupported('keydown')) {
  this.$element.on('keydown', $.proxy(this.keypress, this));
}