How to Prevent Event Propagation from Child to Parent Elements in HTML?

Preventing Event Propagation with Inline Onclick Event Listener

In HTML, inline event listeners allow us to directly add event handling within the element's tag. However, sometimes we encounter situations where a child element's event should not trigger the parent element's event.

Problem:

Consider the following code:

<div onclick="alert('you clicked the header')" class="header">
  <span onclick="alert('you clicked inside the header');">something inside the header</span>
</div>

In this snippet, when the user clicks the span, both the span's click event and the div's click event are triggered.

Solution:

To stop event propagation from the span to the div, we can use the event.stopPropagation() method:

<span onclick="event.stopPropagation(); alert('you clicked inside the header');">something inside the header</span>

By calling event.stopPropagation(), we prevent the event from bubbling up to the parent element, effectively isolating the click event to the span.

Alternative for IE:

For older versions of Internet Explorer, which don't support event.stopPropagation(), we can use window.event.cancelBubble = true:

<span onclick="window.event.cancelBubble = true; alert('you clicked inside the header');">something inside the header</span>

This method achieves the same result by explicitly canceling the event's propagation.

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