How do you catch a click event with plain Javascript?

Question

I know that when using jQuery you can do $(\'element\').click(); to catch the click event of an HTML element, but how do you do that with plain Javascript?

Answer 1

I usaly create a kind of global event handler, very powerful, you can capture className, of the event "types" nodeTypes, you name it, i hope people will find this useul

document.onclick = eventRef

function eventRef(evt) {
    var han;
    evt || (evt = window.event);

    if (evt) {
        var elem = evt.target ? han = evt.target : evt.srcElement && (han = evt.srcElement);

         // evt.type could be, mouseup, mousedown...
        // elem.id is the id or the element
        // elem.className is the class name of the element
        // you could nest expression, use substrings to extract part of a className
        if (evt.type=="click" && elem.id == "gotit" || elem.className == "someClassName") {  
            alert(elem.id);
        }
    }
}