Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-ui-4] Change the pointer cursor to indicate any interactive element.

I'm not a part of any formal W3C process, just a "concerned citizen of the open web" for whom finding this issue was the end of a long strange rabbithole that started with a chat thread questioning whether or not it was appropriate to use the "pointer" to indicate a "clickable" element (so i.e. the exact same thing you have all been talking about here for a while). I'll just share some observations I made along the way to provide an outside point-of-view:

1. The preponderance of practice on the web at-large is to use the pointer to indicate that the element under cursor is "clickable". I could provide a litany of examples, but perhaps the most salient is https://www.w3.org/ itself. See the "Go" (input type=button) for the search feature in the top right. If even the _site of record_ for web standards deviates from its own established norm, it may be an indication that the members of the committee responsible for authoring the standard should consider how it reflects on practice. Even if it introduces some changes to the standard with respect to its stability, I'd urge the committee to consider that a state of practice where _no one follows the standard_ is potentially a greater destabilizing influence on the strength of the standard than a language change that would align the standard with established practice.

2. Having crawled my way down the list of comments on this issue, I am hearing @frivoal 's point about the language in the standard as (to paraphrase): "The language in the standard is intended for browsers and authors will know they are free to do whatever they want." Just to color that in with my own experience on this issue: that's not what occurs. Roughly, here is what happens in practice: 1. Someone writes an authoritative article about how "You should only ever use pointer cursors for links". 2. They link to the language in the standard which supports that view. 3. Anyone questioning the obvious disparity between the claim made in the article and common practice, or considering the usability gains from trying to help users discern clickable things from non-clickable things is silenced. There is a step 4 for the .001% of people like myself that harbor a strange fetish for web standards that leads to this very issue, but most practitioners that care about web standards at all (which already feels like something much less than a plurality) won't get this far and so won't get the benefit of the nuance that @frivoal suggests.

3. Since I'm here, I'm not sure exactly what the protocol for suggesting changes to the committee is but I think I saw someone suggest splitting the semantics under "pointer" might allow the having of cake (keeping the current pointer definition stable as an indicator of a "link") concurrent with its eating (providing an additional cursor to indicate a broader class of "clickable" things as a non-breaking change). Seems like a good idea.

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Received on Friday, 7 September 2018 03:00:30 UTC