Pass mouse events through absolutely-positioned element

I'm attempting to capture mouse events on an element with another absolutely-positioned element on top of it.

Right now, events on the absolutely-positioned element hit it and bubble up to its parent, but I want it to be "transparent" to these mouse events and forward them on to whatever is behind it. How should I implement this?

Solution 1:

pointer-events: none;

Is a CSS property that makes events "pass through" the HTML-element to which the property is applied. It makes the event occur on the element "below".

See for details: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/pointer-events

It is supported by almost all browsers, including IE11; global support was ~98.2% in 05/'21): http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer-events (thanks to @s4y for providing the link in the comments).

Solution 2:

If all you need is mousedown, you may be able to make do with the document.elementFromPoint method, by:

1. removing the top layer on mousedown,
2. passing the x and y coordinates from the event to the document.elementFromPoint method to get the element underneath, and then
3. restoring the top layer.

Solution 3:

Also nice to know...
Pointer-events can be disabled for a parent element (probably transparent div) and yet be enabled for child elements. This is helpful if you work with multiple overlapping div layers, where you want to be able click the child elements of any layer. For this all parenting divs get pointer-events: none and click-children get pointer-events reenabled by pointer-events: all

.parent {
    pointer-events:none;        
}
.child {
    pointer-events:all;
}

<div class="some-container">
   <ul class="layer-0 parent">
     <li class="click-me child"></li>
     <li class="click-me child"></li>
   </ul>

   <ul class="layer-1 parent">
     <li class="click-me-also child"></li>
     <li class="click-me-also child"></li>
   </ul>
</div>