highlight a DOM element on mouse over, like inspect does

Question

We have a bookmarklet, and the user clicks a button and an inspect like highligther needs to kick in. We want to this to be cross browser.

For this we need to detec

Answer 1

You can hook mousemove on document or document.body, then use the target property of the event object to find out the topmost element the mouse is over. Then applying CSS to it is probably most easily done by adding a class to it.

But I wonder if the :hover psuedo-class might save you some trouble...

If not using :hover, here's an example:

(function() {
  var prev;

  if (document.body.addEventListener) {
    document.body.addEventListener('mouseover', handler, false);
  }
  else if (document.body.attachEvent) {
    document.body.attachEvent('mouseover', function(e) {
      return handler(e || window.event);
    });
  }
  else {
    document.body.onmouseover = handler;
  }

  function handler(event) {
    if (event.target === document.body ||
        (prev && prev === event.target)) {
      return;
    }
    if (prev) {
      prev.className = prev.className.replace(/\bhighlight\b/, '');
      prev = undefined;
    }
    if (event.target) {
      prev = event.target;
      prev.className += " highlight";
    }
  }

})();

Live copy | source

Answer 2

With the help of jquery you can do something like this

$('*').hover(
    function(e){
        $(this).css('border', '1px solid black');
        e.preventDefault();
        e.stopPropagation();
        return false;
    },function(e){
        $(this).css('border', 'none');
        e.preventDefault();
        e.stopPropagation();
        return false;
    }
);

With this code in your bookmarklet, you can load what ever code

javascript:function loadScript(src){f=document.createElement('script');if(f){f.setAttribute("type","text/javascript");f.setAttribute("src",src);document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(f);}};loadScript("yourscripturl");