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Comment by ReactNative22 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this. Does this add an event listener to "all" clicks or only for clicks on <a href>?

It gets called on all clicks (line 1, it’s a window-level click handler), then finds the link the click target is inside (line 2), and does nothing if it wasn’t inside a link (line 9).

(You might think that it should use .closest("a[href]") instead of .closest("a"), since a:not([href]) is not a link, but in that case, link.href === "", and so it fails the line 10 is-it-eligible-for-client-side-routing test. Note also that except for the “no href attribute” case, HTMLAnchorElement#href gives a full resolved URL, so <a href=""> will produce the document base URL.)

Fundamentally, there’s no such thing as an event handler that triggers only on links—you instead have to use a global event handler that starts by checking whether it’s being triggered on a link.

Thanks Chris, you are awesome - this is definitely a much better approach since it gets rid of an additional Link Component

I do think, though, that woojoo666’s comment and my response are worth bearing in mind. In this specific situation, I think <Link> is not warranted and mildly better avoided; but in a similar situation where global behaviour wasn’t already forced, I would say to keep the separate component, rather than breaking behavioural encapsulation.

Thank you, I agree

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