Make .delegate(null, 'type', fnHandler) behave like .bind('type', fnHandler)

[maranomynet]

There are circumstances where it would be incredibly handy if jQuery.fn.delegate would handle the special case of an empty/falsy selector parameter, and interpret it as a direct .bind() request on the collection.

The current behavior in jQuery happens to be almost like that, except that when the collection object is missing a selector property things start failing. I suspect there's some sort of a fallback on .live() going on - and causing those unpredictable results.

Adding this as a feature shouldn't add too much bloat to the core library, and would IMHO adhere to the principle of least surprise.

[Rick Waldron]

This will fall under the pending 1.7 event DRY out proposal

[john]

Nominating ticket for 1.7 discussion.

[Rick Waldron]

+1, Falls under #9393

[jaubourg]

-1, I dunno, seems to me like a very edgy case.

[timmywil]

-1, I'd prefer the other way around, and make .on() an alias for bind.

[maranomynet]

I'd like to explain the events that lead to my filing this ticket.

I have a plugin that binds events to a container element. The plugin also accepts a target subselector option to limit the events to just certain elements.

My initial assumption was that passing an empty/null selector to .delegate would act just like .bind. So I tried it:

this.delegate( options.targets||'', 'click', handlerFunc );

...and everything worked perfectly just as I had assumed.

Then after a few weeks of happy use things started to randomly fail, it seemed. After a long and confusing debugging session I finally figured out that the cause was a seemingly aribtary lack of .selector property on the collection.

The following is the code I ended up reverting back to:

if ( options.targets ) {
  this.delegate( options.targets, 'click', handlerFunc );
} else {
  this.bind( 'click', handlerFunc );
}

...and it seems a lot less elegant than the original version.

[Rick Waldron]

I think this ticket should be closed in favor of #9393

[john]

-1, Ehh, why not just do that logic in your code?

[maranomynet]

The point is: The feature is already there. Everything seems to work beautifully - but then it breaks down under specific rare (and seemingly random) circumstances.

[addyosmani]

+1

[ajpiano]

-1, There are a number of cases in jQuery where dynamically building parameters to send to jQuery functions works ALMOST all the time, but due to some kind of data exception, undefined ends up getting passed and jQuery behaves unexpectedly. (undefined as context or the second argument to attr, for instance). Historically, we have not special cased these situations, and I don't think we should start now, especially given the .on enhancement that will handle this problem generically.

[scottgonzalez]

-1

[Rick Waldron]

This will be dealt with in #9393