Javascript Events, Who’s Listening? an Article by ChatGPT

After seeing the release of the new chatGPT API by Open AI I decided to give it a whirl. I figured I could try and leverage this poor little AI to do my bidding and churn out some original (sorta) content for my blog.

I have a little experience with the Open AI models already having made an (offensive chat bot) using the Da Vinci model — I may have run out of credit depending when you are reading this.

This in mind I figured forming a prompt good enough to churn our some half decent content shouldn’t be an issue…

The Prompt

The Article

As a new developer, you may be wondering what exactly “Javascript events” are and how you can make use of them in your code. Well, fear not! In this article, we will take a closer look at the addEventListener method which is available in native vanilla javascript.

First, let’s talk about what events are. In short, an event is something that happens on your website or application that you can react to. This could be a user clicking a button, hovering over a link, or even just scrolling down the page. These events are important because they allow us to make our websites interactive and responsive to user input.

Now, let’s take a look at how we can make use of events in our code. In order to listen for events, we need to use the addEventListener method. This method takes in three arguments – the event we want to listen for, the function we want to run when the event occurs, and an optional options object.

For example, let’s say we have a simple HTML button on our page:
<button>Click me!</button>
To listen for a user clicking on this button, we would use the addEventListener method like this:
const button = document.querySelector("button");
button.addEventListener("click", function() {
console.log("Button was clicked!");
});

In this example, we are listening for a “click” event on the button element. When the event occurs, the function we provided will run, and we can do whatever we want inside of it. In this case, we are just logging a message to the console.

But wait, what if we want to listen for multiple events on the same element? No problem! We can just call the addEventListener method multiple times, like this:
button.addEventListener("click", function() {
console.log("Button was clicked!");
});
button.addEventListener("mouseover", function() {
console.log("Mouse is over the button!");
});

As you can see, we can listen for as many events as we want on the same element. This allows us to make our websites even more interactive and responsive to user input.

It’s important to note that when naming our functions and variables, we should always use clear and descriptive names. This will make our code more readable and easier to understand for other developers. In this example, we named our function “function” which is not very descriptive. A better name would be something like “handleButtonClick” or “onButtonClick”.

Additionally, when working with HTML elements, we should always use proper naming conventions for attributes such as classes and IDs. This will make our code more accessible and easier to style with CSS. In this example, we didn’t give our button any classes or IDs, but if we did, we should use names that are descriptive and relevant to the element’s purpose.

For more information on the addEventListener method and events in general, check out the Mozilla Developer Network documentation here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventTarget/addEventListener

In conclusion, events are a crucial part of making our websites interactive and responsive to user input. By using the addEventListener method, we can listen for events and run our own custom functions when they occur. When naming our functions and variables, and our HTML attributes, it’s important to use clear and descriptive names for the sake of readability and accessibility. Happy coding!