Summary
In this chapter you have learned how to monitor and respond to events. The keyboard and mouse are the only ways the user can interact with your application (although touch, voice, and motion are beginning to offer alternatives), and providing meaningful responses to these inputs is what makes an interactive application interactive. The techniques you have learned are a basic toolkit for building responsive RIAs.
In the next chapter, I’ll show you Ajax techniques that enable your application to respond even faster and smoother to those user inputs, by fetching data from the server and updating the page’s content without making the user wait for a new page.