Can I trigger a JQuery “change” event on an arbitrary HTML element type?

Question

Say I have a JQuery object, el , that has selected an element. Is it legal, safe, and reasonable to call el.trigger("change") if the selected element is a DIV? What about other element types? For that matter, can I call el.change() ?

The JQuery documentation for .change() says:

The change event is sent to an element when its value changes. This event is limited to <input> elements, <textarea> boxes and <select> elements.

It's not clear to me what "limited" means here. It might be referring to the fact that these are the only three element types that will produce these events automatically, but it could instead mean that other elements aren't allowed to.

Empirically, Chrome v28 seems to allow it, but I want to know if I can expect it to work in general.

Goal

I have a pseudo-control that's composed of a set of buttons and spans wrapped in a div. Each instance of the control maintains and manages a value, which is modified by clicking the control's buttons. When the value changes, I need to send an event out from the div so that the rest of the page can react. I don't want to listen for the click events outside the control, since that couples the surrounding code to the controls' internals and not all clicks change the value.

I could create a new event name, but the built-in "change" event seems like conceptually correct, so I'd rather use it if I can. As an added bonus, my page already a "change" handler bound the right place with the right behavior (because I have some input and select controls on the page, too).

I need to support IE8 and up, in case the answer varies by browser make and version.

Answer 1

There are no restrictions, you can trigger any event type you like on any HTML element.
The jQuery documentation is simply telling you that change is only automatically triggered on <input> , <textarea> and <select>