Re: Pointer Events Recommendation delayed by a Formal Objection

Hello all,
Since you made this information avaible for public list, let me say my
thoughts.

Personally, I think the situation between PointerEvents and TouchEvents is
simillar to situation of addEventListener and attachEvent (exept of what TE
were standartized, but attachEvent not). Let's be honest, TouchEvents is
not better than PE (even intiatiator of FO said that by mentioned what
market made decition) and currently bad guys is Apple, like in time of
attachEvent was Microsoft.

As a front-end developer, I really clearly can imagine situation where no
one pushed forward addEventListener, community sticked to attachEvent
(cannot remember % of IE in that time, but I think market also made
decition in that time). That whould be so pain, and actually it's pain now
to work with TouchEvents (I once heard about pain to work with PE from
Yandex folks, but from no one else). Maybe PE not perfectly designed and we
can easily find problems with them, but in the same time, TouchEvents are
really worse.

It's very sad what instead of pushing on Apple, some decided to push W3C
cancel Recommendation. As I understand, W3C is intended to move Web
forward, which absolutely are not TouchEvents with their broked model. In
fact, each vendor implements it in their own way and there is no really
change to have same behavior between browsers. There is no guarantee what
Apple will update their implementation when second version (or complete
errata) of TouchEvent will be published. As per separate thread, Apple has
their own heuristic around TouchEvents, and, they do not plan to share them
or remove them (as far as I know).

All these errata and second versions of TouchEvents are attempts to fix
broken thing and keep compatibility with broken code, vendor heuristics,
etc. This seems weird in a glance of PE events which are new, might be
easily arranged to developer needs and might have similar implementation
with all vendors, because, all of them (except Apple) are here and all
share many thoughts and implementation details all the time.

This is my position of this situation. Many times developers and vendors
agreed what PE is better, but all follow Apple. How much time TouchEvents
are here? I am not sure, but they never upgraded since they came to us.
Also, since they arrived and same for now -- developers always has problems
with it. So please, push Web forward, no one wants to have Web ruled by
one-vendor implementation.

Thank you.


2015-02-05 17:39 GMT+02:00 Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>:

> Hi, Patrick–
>
> On 2/5/15 9:45 AM, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
>
>> On 05/02/2015 14:29, Arthur Barstow wrote:
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> An update on the publication of the Pointer Events Recommendation ...
>>>
>>> The comment period ended on January 16 and the review results are
>>> Member-confidential [1]. Of the 17 W3C Members that replied to the
>>> proposal to publish the Recommendation, 16 supported publishing the
>>> specification "as is" and one Member (who is also a member of the
>>> Pointer Events Working Group) filed a Formal Objection and "suggests the
>>> document not be published as a Recommendation" (the formal objection is
>>> Member-confidential [FO] so I can't copy it to this list).
>>>
>>> Sorry for the delay; I'll send an update when I know more.
>>>
>>
>> In principle, what's the process here? Do we get a chance to respond to
>> the objection?
>>
>
> Just to let you know the process:
>
> 1) When the Formal Objection was raised, I had conversations with those
> members who contacted me about the Formal Objection; for example, I had an
> informal conversation with Jacob Rossi of Microsoft, and with Art Barstow
> as chair, as well as Chaals from Yandex, to determine what the preferred
> path forward would be; the sentiment from everyone I spoke to, except
> Yandex, was that they wanted to move Pointer Events forward as a W3C
> Recommendation (I didn't feel the need to speak to the entire WG, because
> the WG already formally decided to request to move to Recommendation).
>
> 2) We arranged a meeting with the Director, the WG chair, and the
> objector, to give each "side" a chance to put their argument forth to the
> Director, and to see if we could find common ground for moving forward.
> Each party made their case, and while we didn't find common ground, the
> Director collected the information to make an informed decision about
> whether to publish.
>
> 3) No formal decision by the Director has been made yet, but it will be
> made and announced soon. At this point, the Director is making another
> attempt to find a mutually acceptable path forward. I expect this to be
> resolved (one way or another) in the next week.
>
> I apologize for the delay, and the lack of clarity thus far. I'm somewhat
> hampered in what I can say because of member and team confidentiality. At
> the same time, however, it's important that we treat Formal Objections
> (from anyone) seriously, and try our best to find a mutually acceptable
> path forward, even if it causes a short delay.
>
> I can see an argument for this whole process to be more open and
> transparent, with a notification to the WG about the Formal Objection right
> away. However, that would invite an even lengthier discussion, and we hoped
> that an initial call with objector and the Director might make that
> unnecessary. Unfortunately, that did not happen, putting the publication on
> hold until a final decision has been made. Because of that, at this point,
> Art appropriately decided to let the WG know why the spec wasn't published.
>
>
> (Personally (e.g. not an official W3C stance), I think Formal Objections,
> and the meeting with the Director to discuss them, should all be done on
> the public record. But that's not my decision to make; it's up to the
> Advisory Committee.)
>
>
> Regards–
> –Doug
>
>


-- 
@nekrtemplar <https://twitter.com/nekrtemplar>