Joystick and Mouse-Capture APIs in Web Events WG

Hi, folks-

The original charter of the Web Events WG defined a specific set of 
deliverables related to 2 related kinds of input device: touch screens 
and pen tablets.  But it also described events at an intentional level, 
and the goal was to capture how different user input devices 
("modalities") interacted with the more traditional mouse and keyboard 
events, so that authors could write generic event handlers that would 
adapt to the input device in use; this is also the goal of some of the 
groups in the WAI domain.

Both the joystick and the mouse-capture mode proposed APIs also fit into 
this broader category of alternate modality to supplement traditional 
input devices and modes, so as the person who wrote the charter, my 
opinion is that they are in the spirit of the Web Events WG, though they 
would need to be explicitly added as deliverables.

That said, I don't want the group to suffer from scope creep, so if the 
groups doesn't feel it can work on them and stay focused, I support that 
decision.  Similarly, from a legal / IP perspective, I want the scope 
very tightly defined, so the lawyers of potential group participants 
know precisely what commitments they might be making, so a company can 
feel comfortable joining the WG.

I think that we can still keep the scope of the group's charter tight 
and well-defined, even with the addition of these 2 APis, so long as we 
describe them in detail; since we have proposed drafts of the specs in 
question, this should be easy to do.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Developer Outreach
Project Coordinator, SVG, WebApps, Touch Events, and Audio WGs

Received on Tuesday, 20 September 2011 15:18:58 UTC