Event: defaultPrevented property
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.
The defaultPrevented read-only property of the Event interface returns a boolean value indicating whether or not the call to Event.preventDefault() canceled the event.
Value
A boolean value, where true indicates that the default user agent action was prevented, and false indicates that it was not.
Example
This example logs attempts to visit links from two <a> elements. JavaScript is used to prevent the second link from working.
HTML
html
<p><a id="link1" href="#link1">Visit link 1</a></p> <p><a id="link2" href="#link2">Try to visit link 2</a> (you can't)</p> <p id="log"></p> JavaScript
js
function stopLink(event) { event.preventDefault(); } function logClick(event) { const log = document.getElementById("log"); if (event.target.tagName === "A") { log.innerText = event.defaultPrevented ? `Sorry, but you cannot visit this link!\n${log.innerText}` : `Visiting link…\n${log.innerText}`; } } const a = document.getElementById("link2"); a.addEventListener("click", stopLink); document.addEventListener("click", logClick); Result
Specifications
| Specification |
|---|
| DOM # ref-for-dom-event-defaultprevented① |