Adding javascript to every occurrence of a certain HTML element

Question

I was wondering if there was a way of adding javascript in every occurrence of a certain HTML tag, eg.

<td onmousedown="">

At the moment I just have it in every single one of my td tags in my table, but there must be a cleaner way. Something like adding javascript in the way CSS adds formatting.

Answer 1

Add an event listener (See also: Quirks Mode on events and on event listeners) to your document looking for mousedown events and filter it on the basis of the originating element.

There is a good answer here on Stackoverflow as well.

Answer 2

What your looking for is most likely "event binding." This can be done via your script rather than embedded in the HTML code. There are lots of different ways to accomplish such a task, here is one of them using "td" as in your example.

var items = document.getElementsByTagName("td");
for (var i=0; i<items.length; i++) {
  items[i].onmousedown = YourMouseDownFunction;
}

Answer 3

You want jQuery. See http://jQuery.org This can be accomplished using a "selector" (jquery term)