Removing event management from React core is a common request but it wouldn't really be a wise decision.
1. Need a way to manage events: All the applications are handling events in one way or another. So you've got to have a way to implement event handling in a React application.
2. Cannot use existing event libraries: Because React manages its own Virtual DOM and has a very declarative nature, it is not easy to use raw DOM imperative APIs in other to implement event handling. Therefore, you cannot just plug in any event handling library, you've got to have one that works on-top of the Virtual DOM abstraction.
3. Performance is a requirement: The way you code in React is by describing the way you want the DOM to look like at all time. If not implemented properly, the performance is extremely bad. The fact that we implement global event delegation is not just a bonus, for some of our apps adding/removing event listeners is actually the bottleneck.
4. Bonuses: Having compatibility for IE8 and custom event plugins is actually the cherry on-top of the cake. Since React has its own event management, supporting those is pretty trivial and isn't a big amount of code.
We worked very hard so that React core is extremely small and doesn't contain "other useful webapp stuff". We have a special addons section for that: http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/addons.html
1. Need a way to manage events: All the applications are handling events in one way or another. So you've got to have a way to implement event handling in a React application.
2. Cannot use existing event libraries: Because React manages its own Virtual DOM and has a very declarative nature, it is not easy to use raw DOM imperative APIs in other to implement event handling. Therefore, you cannot just plug in any event handling library, you've got to have one that works on-top of the Virtual DOM abstraction.
3. Performance is a requirement: The way you code in React is by describing the way you want the DOM to look like at all time. If not implemented properly, the performance is extremely bad. The fact that we implement global event delegation is not just a bonus, for some of our apps adding/removing event listeners is actually the bottleneck.
4. Bonuses: Having compatibility for IE8 and custom event plugins is actually the cherry on-top of the cake. Since React has its own event management, supporting those is pretty trivial and isn't a big amount of code.
We worked very hard so that React core is extremely small and doesn't contain "other useful webapp stuff". We have a special addons section for that: http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/addons.html