Triggering mousemove on the mouse's current position

Question

Suppose we have a <div> with a mousemove handler bound to it. If the mouse pointer enters and moves around this div, the event is triggered.

However, I am dealing with a rich web application where <div>s move around the screen, appear and disappear... So it may happen that a <div> appears under the mouse pointer. In this case, mousemove is not triggered. However, I need it to be. (Note that replacing mousemove with mouseover does not change this behavior.)

Specifically, the <div> has to be highlighted and I deem it as a UI flaw to require the user to do a slight mouse move in order to trigger the highlighting.

Is it possible to trigger the mousemove event programatically? And I do not mean

document.getElementById('mydiv').onmousemove();

because onmousemove is parametrised by the event object, which I do not have.

Is it possible to make browser behave as if onmousemove was triggered on the current mouse's position (although in fact the mouse didn't move)?

Answer 1

You could modify your mousemove to keep a state variable with the current mouse coordinates, and use that information to perform a collision detection that you call both on mouse move, and on moving a div.

A little example of what that might look like