- From: Steven Pemberton <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl>
- Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:23:28 +0200
- To: www-dom@w3.org
- Cc: "Forms WG" <public-forms@w3.org>, "XHTML WG" <public-xhtml2@w3.org>
In section http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#event-type-DOMActivate it says "Warning! The DOMActivate event type is defined in this specification for reference and completeness, but this specification deprecates the use of this event type in favor of the related event type click. Other specifications may define and maintain their own DOMActivate event type for backwards compatibility." This is the wrong approach, and should not be done. In the decade since DOMActivate was introduced markup languages have adopted DOMActivate as the 'proper' abstract device-independent version of activation, and it has been widely implemented, and adopted in documents. Having to rename all uses of DOMActivate will involve a lot of editing, a lot of re-educating and a lot of re-tooling. The advantage of a centrally standardised DOMActivate is that it is interoperable and works cross-namespace having the same semantics everywhere. If each namespace has to define its own DOMActivate, making generic markup that will work across namespaces will be hard-to-impossible. Another problem is that if true hardware events, like click, get mixed up with the abstract events like DOMActivate, then it will be harder to differentiate between hardware events when you need them, and abstract events when you don't. As Apple's resent proposal to W3C[1], discussed on the Hypertext Coordination Group, the correct way to process events is to process the hardware events when you need to, and to use the abstract events when you can. Deprecating DOMActivate is going in the opposite direction, is a retrograde step, and should not happen. Best wishes, Steven Pemberton User Interface Independence for Accessible Rich Internet Applications http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2010JulSep/att-0106/UserInterfaceIndependence.html
Received on Monday, 18 October 2010 12:24:07 UTC