You don't have to bind the handler to the nearest parent, you could bind it to the document, html, body, or any ancestors.
Delegate & Live are virtually identical, delegate just provides a more logical manner of assigning the handler TO the delegate.
Also, by assigning it to a specific delegate rather than to the document (by default with .live()), you are able to reach the handler quicker when the event bubbles from the target through the DOM tree.