How to get the ID of a child when mouseover parent

Question

I guess that my question is quite simple but I'm a real beginner in javascript and I can't find what I am looking for :

I am trying to get the ID of a li when mouse is over the nav or ul... My HTML structure would be :

<nav><ul id="menu">
<li id="FirstLink">Link1</li>
<li id="SecondLink">Link2</li>
<li id="ThirdLink">Link3</li>
</ul></nav>

So my goal is to listen for a mouseover (and mouseout) event on each li, but a script with 10 listener (for 5 li) is too much dirty...

That's why I thought of a script like :

var menu = document.getElementById("menu");
menu.addEventListener('mouseover', myFunction, false);

function myFunction () {
//something that get the ID of the <li> that is currently under the mouse and can put it inside a variable as "Link1"
}

But if there is a better solution, I will be happy to know it ! (I would like to stay in pure js)

Answer 1

To get the ID of the hovered element you need to use event.target.
For that you need to pass event as a parameter in your function.
Then you can get the .id attribute of that element.

function myFunction(event) {
    show_result.innerHTML = event.target.id;
}

Demo here

Answer 2

var menu = document.getElementById("menu");
menu.addEventListener('mouseover', myFunction, false);

function myFunction (event) {
    var li = event.target;
    if( li.nodeName !== 'li' ) return;

    // do your stuff with li
}

Answer 3

put the event on child elements only

var menu = document.getElementById("menu");
for( var counter = 0; counter< menu.childNodes.length; counter++)
{
    menu.childNodes[ counter ].addEventListener('mouseover', function(){
      alert( "id is  " + this.id  ); 
    }, false);
}

Answer 4

http://jsfiddle.net/neuroflux/ssSnN/

and

$('#menu').children("li").on('mouseover', function() {
    var childID = $(this).attr("id");
    //YOUR ID WILL BE childID!
});