Add support for the HTML5 `oninput` event

[Andy E]

All the edge major browsers appear to support the oninput event, which fires for text input into an element. The event itself is superior to key events because it fires for all forms of text input.

A while ago, I wrote a plugin that normalizes the event for browsers that don't support it, notably IE6-8. I believe this works well enough, despite a few limitations. Despite the existence of this event (and the plugin), every day I see people recommending the use of onkeyup for acting on user input. Integrating this event into jQuery may help these users learn to handle user input more appropriately.

The following fiddle demonstrates the event (and the plugin) very basically: All it does is copies the text as you type, but as you can tell, there is no visual delay.

Further reading:

All it does is copies the text as you type, but as you can tell, there is no visual delay.

Further reading:

[dmethvin]

This is quite a bit of code so I don't think we're in a hurry to include it into core. I'd suggest making it available as a plugin for now. If you'd like to suggest it for 1.7: ​https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&authkey=CPmgicsO&formkey=dG0yTEs2ZTFWQUhDRUp5dzRyc3NwV2c6MA#gid=0

[john]

This was suggested for 1.7.

[john]

Nominating ticket for 1.7 discussion.

[jaubourg]

-1, Let's start as a plugin so that we can assess the limitations.

[timmywil]

-1, plugin

[dmethvin]

-1, Plugin first.

[anonymous]

I wrote a plugin (as I said in the original filing). I also discuss some of the limitations in the same post.

​http://whattheheadsaid.com/projects/input-special-event

Also, I've just noticed a bug in IE 9 where the oninput event doesn't fire when the backspace or delete keys are pressed - my plugin doesn't yet deal with that.

[john]

-1, Would be good to prove as a plugin.

[Andy E]

I'm not sure I understand this, do you mean an "official" plugin of some sort, or are people just not reading the ticket properly? Despite the ticket body and my other comment saying "I have already provided a plugin", everyone is still saying "-1 plugin first".

This has left me rather confused.

[Rick Waldron]

hey Andy,

The comments you see are votes by core, bus and ui team members - this ticket was elevated to 1.7 proposal status.

As for official plugin, that's not likely - but if you write a solid plugin that has a high adoption rate, there is a better chance for core consideration, though rare

hope that cleared things up for you. Feel free to ask any other questions!

[ajpiano]

+0, Seems the full ticket proposal got truncated and the fiddle and links got cut off - I've amended the description accordingly, and taken a look at your plugin. At the moment, it seems to have a number of shortcomings - the lack of support for delegation, for one, so it seems there's more research necessary into the problem. I like the idea of providing a cross-browser solution to this, however - have you heard of much adoption of the plugin thus far?

[[email protected]…]

I know several people have commented on my blog post and I regularly direct people to it from Stack Overflow. The plugin is the most visited page on my blog, but I only installed analytics a couple of weeks ago so there's not really enough data to say anything solid.

Telling people doesn't always work, though; there are a lot of confused individuals out there promoting events like keyup for input counters and the like. Most jQuery plugins detecting input use keydown, keypress or keyup too. input would serve them much better, catching cutting, pasting, dropping, spell checker corrections and others. IMO, having the event supported by jQuery would immediately increase awareness of the event, improving the quality of input detection scripts around the web.

As for delegation, it would work for the browsers that support the event natively, since it bubbles but, as for the older browsers (namely IE6-8), it would be difficult to get the event working for "future elements". I did think about this to some extent, though, and may be able to come up with a solution based on focusin or mouseover -- when an input element receives either event it is checked against the delegate selector and then the input event is applied to the element if necessary.

[Rick Waldron]

Mathias also has an implementation: ​http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/oninput

I believe he is going to have this, with unit tests, on github today.