class method document.observe
document.observe(eventName, handler) → Element
Listens for the given event over the entire document. Can also be used
for listening to "dom:loaded"
event.
document.observe
is the document-wide version of Element#observe
.
Using document.observe
is equivalent to
Event.observe(document, eventName, handler)
.
The "dom:loaded"
event
One really useful event generated by Prototype that you might want to
observe on the document is "dom:loaded"
. On supporting browsers it
fires on DOMContentLoaded
and on unsupporting browsers it simulates it
using smart workarounds. If you used window.onload
before you might
want to switch to dom:loaded
because it will fire immediately after
the HTML document is fully loaded, but before images on the page are
fully loaded. The load
event on window
only fires after all page
images are loaded, making it unsuitable for some initialization purposes
like hiding page elements (so they can be shown later).
Example
document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
// initially hide all containers for tab content
$$('div.tabcontent').invoke('hide');
});