Touch events
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Discover the basics of working with touch events in JavaScript
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Touch events are those events that are triggered when viewing the page on a mobile device, like a smartphone or a tablet.
They allow you to track multitouch events.
We have 4 touch events:
touchstart
a touch event has started (the surface is touched)touchend
a touch event has ended (the surface is no longer touched)touchmove
the finger (or whatever is touching the device) moves over the surfacetouchcancel
the touch event has been cancelled
Every time a touch event occurs we are passed a touch event:
const link = document.getElementById('my-link')
link.addEventListener('touchstart', (event) => {
// touch event started
})
Here are all the properties we can access on that event
identifier
an unique identifier for this specific event. Used to track multi-touch events. Same finger = same identifier.clientX
/clientY
the x and y coordinates of the mouse pointer relative to the browser window, regardless of scrollingscreenX
/screenY
the x and y coordinates of the mouse pointer in the screen coordinatespageX
/pageY
the x and y coordinates of the mouse pointer in the page coordinates (including scrolling)target
the element touched
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→ Read my
Browser Events Tutorial
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