Pointer Events types and keyboard/keyboard-like interfaces?

Although Pointer Events allow for much easier handling of 
pen/touch/mouse, one type of input that still requires completely 
separate event handling are keyboards (which fire keydown/keypress/keyup 
and the more abstracted focus/blur/click) and keyboard-like interfaces 
(for instance Talkback screenreader on Android, which seems to fire 
focus/blur when the focus rectangle is moved sequentially, plus an 
interesting blur > mousedown > mouseup > click > focus sequence when a 
control is activated on a page).

I don't think it'd matter too much to distinguish between sequential 
navigation (TAB/SHIFT+TAB style moving along the cycle of focusable 
elements) and spatial navigation (old Opera-style SHIFT+cursor keys to 
move between focusable elements as they appear in the visual layout), 
but in principle, would it make sense to include a new pointerType value 
of "keyboard" or similar?

On a more general note, is it out of scope for this spec to also suggest 
that browsers should then fire the relevant pointer events for 
keyboard/keyboard-like interfaces? I seem to remember that Sangwhan Moon 
mentioned to me that Opera were planning to do this for upcoming TV 
browser versions at some point...but basically, mapping the more 
abstracted events (not the key* ones) as follows:

focus - pointerenter > pointerover
click (when activated with kbd) - pointerdown > pointermove > pointerup 
(sort of like the equivalent of mouse compatibility events fired for 
touch events)
blur - pointerout > pointerleave

Thoughts?

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Saturday, 4 January 2014 22:07:36 UTC