How to replace click with touchstart on iOS devices

Question

Objective

To close the parent div of an anchor tag when clicked. In the code below, I want to hide div performance_tt when the user clicks on anchor tag close_performance_tt.

Problem

Unable to get it to work on iOS devices after spending several hours at it. Works fine on everything else, even a BlackBerry 10 device.

<div id="performance_tt" style="display: none;width: 300px;height: 200;overflow: auto;padding: 5px;background-color: yellow;">
    <div>Website performance has become an important consideration for most sites.
    The speed of a website affects usage and user satisfaction, as well as search engine rankings, a factor that directly correlates to revenue and retention.
    As a result, creating a system that is optimized for fast responses and low latency is key.</div>
    <a id="close_performance_tt" href="#">Close</a>
    <script>
    var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
    var isiOS = (navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPad|iPhone|iPod)/g) ? true : false);
    if (isiOS) {
        $("#close_performance_tt").bind('touchstart', function() {
            alert('Touch-start event triggered');
        });
    } else {
        $("#close_performance_tt").bind('click', function() {
            alert('Click event triggered');
        });
    }
    </script>
</div>

Answer 1

Define a clickhandler that you can use later on:

var clickHandler = ('ontouchstart' in document.documentElement ? "touchstart" : "click");

$("a").bind(clickHandler, function(e) {
    alert("clicked or tapped. This button used: " + clickHandler);
});

This will trigger click on non-touch devices and touchstart on touch devices.

When that is said, I will strongly recommend using Fast click instead, and use regular click-events. With the above solution, you will trigger "touchstart" on links when you swipe on it to scroll the page for instance - which is not ideal.

Answer 2

In iOs a tag is a clickable element, so touch on the link will trigger the mouse events (including click).

This code

$("#close_performance_tt").bind('click',function() { 
    alert('Click event triggered');                             
}); 

will work fine on iOs.

For more information: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/HandlingEvents/HandlingEvents.html

Answer 3

See http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/02/mouse_event_bub.html

For iOS mouse events like click do not bubbe unless:

• The target element of the event is a link or a form field.
• The target element, or any of its ancestors up to but not including the , has an explicit event handler set for any of the mouse events. This event handler may be an empty function.
• The target element, or any of its ancestors up to and including the document has a cursor: pointer CSS declarations.

The easiest solution for me is to apply cursor: pointer everywhere in case it is a iOS touch device. As there's no cursor it does not have any visual impact