@HostBinding and @HostListener: what do they do and what are they for?

Question

In my meanderings around the world wide interweb, and now especially the angular.io style docs, I find many references to @HostBinding and @HostListener

Answer 1

One thing that adds confusion to this subject is the idea of decorators is not made very clear, and when we consider something like...

@HostBinding('attr.something') 
get something() { 
    return this.somethingElse; 
 }

It works, because it is a get accessor. You couldn't use a function equivalent:

@HostBinding('attr.something') 
something() { 
    return this.somethingElse; 
 }

Otherwise, the benefit of using @HostBinding is it assures change detection is run when the bound value changes.