The cancelable
read-only property of the Event
interface indicates whether the event can be canceled, and therefore prevented as if the event never happened.
If the event is not cancelable, then its cancelable
property will be false
and the event listener cannot stop the event from occurring.
Most browser-native events that can be canceled are the ones that result from the user interacting with the page. Canceling the click
, wheel
, or beforeunload
events would prevent the user from clicking on something, scrolling the page with the mouse wheel, or navigating away from the page, respectively.
Synthetic events created by other JavaScript code define if they can be canceled when they are created.
To cancel an event, call the preventDefault()
method on the event. This keeps the implementation from executing the default action that is associated with the event.
Event listeners that handle multiple kinds of events may want to check cancelable
before invoking their preventDefault()
methods.