Forums | MacLife

I made a phpbb3 theme last year, and recently I've been updating it to make it completely xhtml-1.1-compliant.

While doing this I decided to remove the use of innerHTML and any event handlers that might not work in the most proper way.

First I removed all inline HTML event handlers and moved them all to external javascript files or to commented code within the page.

But after that, I decided to remove any instances of events added like

thisElement.onclick = function ()
{
    doThis();
}

and replace them with

thisElement.addEventListener('click', function ()
{
  doThis();
}, false)

I assumed that removing all inline HTML event handlers would decrease page load times, but the second change seems to have also decreased them.

Is using addEventListener really faster than just using onclick= or am I just feeling a placebo effect?