Dom: Symbols should be allowed as Event types.

[bicknellr]

This prevents the need to use a namespacing scheme or filter out similarly named events in the listeners themselves. Components generating particular events could instead expose symbols on their constructor (or other relevant object) to allow a user to listen to an event.

[annevk]

Sounds like a reasonable feature. We'd need interest from implementers and support in IDL. I'd also like to hear from framework developers and major websites if they'd use this.

[jcrben]

I'm not an implementor or a developer at a major website (just a small one!). Could you provide a brief example of how this would look in practice to understand how user-friendly it would be? I'd like to avoid using jQuery, but namespacing events is one of those things that the native event listening API doesn't seem to provide.

[annevk]

Something like

const eventType = Symbol(),
      event = new Event(eventType);
eventTarget.addEventListener(eventType, ...);

[bicknellr]

^ Yes, that's exactly it.

[annevk]

@benjamingr have there been requests for this in Node.js?

[benjamingr]

It's hard to say:

• EventTarget is very new and people mostly use it for AbortController, the only feature requests I got is to "add AbortSignal to more APIs" and provide tooling to make it more approachable and debuggable
• Node's EventEmitter already allows dispatching symbols for at least a few years. I can find some examples (e.g. https://github.com/webvalera96/currency-rates/blob/99a5e6caf36e17482faa064656b2d546707a9e7d/lib/HTTPClient.js#L31 ) that do this but it seems to be pretty rare and uncommon.