Hands up if you’ve ever had to be notified when a user has changed an <input />’s value. I have. Hands up if you’ve been doing it wrong. I have! I feel a bit stupid for not knowing about the oninput event, but it gives us a great way to check for user input in a consistent way. And, best part, it’s well supported (including IE9 and above).

The problem with other methods - my go to of the past being onkeydown or onkeyUp events - is that they only fire when a user keys down or up. Which sounds obvious, of course, but say a user holds a key down that event is only going to fire once despite the input changing multiple times.

The onchange event suffers from much the same fate. This will only fire when the <input /> loses focus, and that’s just not all that helpful.

oninput acts just as we’d expect. Telling us exactly when the input has changed. Tasty. If you must support oldIE you can always fall back to onkeydown / onkeyup events for those browsers.

More information can be found here.