The objects that represent events in D3 are extensions of DOM event objects. They inherit methods and properties from DOM's Event interface. Events can originate from any DOM source and can be captured by any DOM targets. When using a library such as D3, you can frequently ignore the details of event handling and dispatching, but when things don't work out as expected, the solution may require some low-level tuning.

This section describes some common event configurations you can apply using DOM and CSS, and introduces methods and objects from the D3 library that make DOM events easier to use in SVG selections. Since event handling in D3 is an extension of native event handling, a brief overview of native DOM events is provided in the following section.