DOM 3 Events Last Call Comments

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group would like to offer the following
comments on the DOM 3 Events Last Call Working Draft, which we discussed at
our face to face meeting last week. Unfortunately we missed the deadline for
LC comments because we were still wrapping up from the face to face, but we
hope that you will still find our comments of value.

1. Because multimodal interaction allows the same user intent (a change,
selection, or submission, for example) to be expressed through a variety of
modalities, including speech, pen input, or accelerometer input, we believe
it is important to consider more "semantic events". By semantic events we
mean events that are based on user intention or an abstract semantic
meaning, as opposed to the mechanism used to generate the event.  It should
be possible to indicate concepts like select, activate, undo, and value
change without being tied to if it was a keydown event or a mousedown event
or a speech input event or pressing a green button.  While there may still
be a desire for the mechanistic events that describe how user input was
collected, there should be more information, and a clear separation around
similarly fleshed out semantic events that represent what the user intention
is or otherwise what the semantics of the event are. In addition to
multimodal use cases this is also relevant to accessibility because user
intent may be expressed through an assistive device rather than a
traditional mouse and keyboard interface.

2. Specifically, there are some general purpose events that would be useful
in a variety of contexts that are no longer part of the DOM spec (change,
submit, reset, etc.).  It seems like these general purpose events should be
in the general DOM event specification.

3. Another specific comment is that the Composition Event is not clearly
defined in the speech recognition case.  While the compositionstart event
describes how speech recognition would use it, the compositionupdate and
compositionend are not as clearly spelled out (both what they should be set
to and how often they should occur).

4. Editorial:
a. The table of contents has some issues, for instance 6.1.2.3 is not in the
table of contents. 
b. Appendix C doesn't have section numbers for subsections, either in the
table of contents or the text, unlike the other appendices.
c.  Section 6.1.2.3 on Media Remote Controls has typesetting text ("Lorem
ipsum dolor ..." etc.) still present.

Best regards,
Debbie Dahl

Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 14:19:31 UTC