React Design Patterns and Best Practices

Events

Events work in a slightly different way across the various browsers. React tries to abstract the way events work and give developers a consistent interface to deal with. This is a great feature of React, because we can forget about the browsers we are targeting and write event handlers and functions that are vendor-agnostic.

To offer this feature, React introduces the concept of the Synthetic Event. A Synthetic Event is an object that wraps the original event object provided by the browser, and it has the same properties, no matter the browser where it is created.

To attach an event listener to a node and get the event object when the event is fired, we can use a simple convention which recalls the way events are attached to the DOM nodes. ...