How Can I Determine the Currently Focused DOM Element in JavaScript?

Determining the Element with Focus in JavaScript

Finding the DOM element currently possessing focus can be a useful task for various user interface interactions.

document.activeElement

The solution to this problem lies in the document.activeElement property. It provides the reference to the DOM element that holds the focus. This property is supported across modern browsers, making it a reliable solution for JavaScript projects.

Implementation

To use document.activeElement in practice, you can retrieve the focused element like this:

const focusedElement = document.activeElement;

This will give you a reference to the currently focused element, allowing you to manipulate it or perform any necessary operations.

Additional Considerations

In older browsers, detecting which form field has focus was not straightforward. As a workaround, you could assign "focus" and "blur" event handlers to all fields, tracking the last-focused element in a variable. The "blur" handler would clear this variable upon losing focus.

Blurring the Active Element

Once you have the reference to the active element, you can use the blur method to remove focus from it. This can be useful when you need to programmatically move the focus to a different element:

document.activeElement.blur();

This will transfer focus back to the body element.

Related Resources

• [activeElement Browser Compatibility](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/document.activeElement#Browser_compatibility)
• [jQuery alternative for document.activeElement](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9508980/jquery-alternative-for-document-activeelement)

The above is the detailed content of How Can I Determine the Currently Focused DOM Element in JavaScript?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!