Event: target property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The read-only target property of the Event interface is a reference to the object onto which the event was dispatched. It is different from Event.currentTarget when the event handler is called during the bubbling or capturing phase of the event.

Value

The associated EventTarget.

Example

The event.target property can be used in order to implement event delegation.

js
// Make a list
const ul = document.createElement("ul");
document.body.appendChild(ul);

const li1 = document.createElement("li");
const li2 = document.createElement("li");
ul.appendChild(li1);
ul.appendChild(li2);

function hide(evt) {
  // evt.target refers to the clicked <li> element
  // This is different from evt.currentTarget, which would refer to the parent <ul> in this context
  evt.target.style.visibility = "hidden";
}

// Attach the listener to the list
// It will fire when each <li> is clicked
ul.addEventListener("click", hide, false);

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-event-target③

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobileserver
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Deno
Node.js
target

Legend

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Full support
Full support

See also