Why is using onClick() in HTML a bad practice?

Question

I have heard many times that using JavaScript events, such as onClick(), in HTML is a bad practice, because it\'s not good for semantics. I would like to know w

Answer 1

It's not good for several reasons:

• it mixes code and markup
• code written this way goes through eval
• and runs in the global scope

The simplest thing would be to add a name attribute to your element, then you could do:

document.myelement.onclick = function() {
    window.popup('/map/', 300, 300, 'map');
    return false;
};

although modern best practise would be to use an id instead of a name, and use addEventListener() instead of using onclick since that allows you to bind multiple functions to a single event.