Is it possible to have jQuery.click trigger on the top element only?

It sounds to me like you're looking for .stopPropagation(). Calling stopPropagation will prevent the event from "bubbling" up to parent containers.

You want to stop event propagation, you do this in jQuery by calling the stopPropagation method on the event object.

$('li,div,ul').click(function (e) {  
    e.stopPropagation();
    alert(this.id); 
});

I believe you'd want to use stopPropagation(); inside the click function.