Re: Phasing out mouse compatibility events on tap?

Quickfire gut reaction (beyond "dammit, do you want to remove all 
interesting topics from my presentation/workshop?")

On 16/01/2015 15:51, Rick Byers wrote:
> I believe lots of websites still rely on these events for compat,

Which I believe is their entire "raison d'etre"...I'm sure it was a 
pragmatic solution taken by Apple at the time.

> but we
> should start thinking about how we could phase them out.  Eg. maybe we
> should define an API to enable/disable them and work towards making
> disabling the default - at least in modern scenarios?

Two issues:

- the events are there for compat with "legacy" content...which is 
usually unlikely to be updated now. So default should be to have the 
compat events still enabled by default, no?

- how do you programmatically define/recognise (with heuristics) a 
"modern scenario"? I'd be weary of automagic behavior here. Also, there 
may be scenarios where even modern (recently built) sites somehow make 
use of mouse compat events (don't ask me why...) somehow (even if just 
to simplify their handling of stuff, e.g. setting a flag on touch* 
event, but leaving the actual functionality to happen on mouse* event).

Perhaps looking on load if any mouse listeners have been registered may 
be an initial approach (though it would fall foul of any listeners that 
are dynamically added at a later date).

>  We could pretty
> easily get some experience with this now - eg. a flag in chromium which
> disables the mouse* events on tap for sites we identify as not needing
> "desktop workarounds" (i.e. based on the viewport)?  Matt, would doing
> something like this address your concern?
>
> input-dev, WDYT - should we try to do some implementation
> experimentation in chromium here?  TECG, do you think this is a problem
> worth tackling / potentially designing an API for?
>
> Rick
>

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Friday, 16 January 2015 16:01:37 UTC