Re: Tweak wording in introduction?

(Apologies for being late to the group, re-org madness)

On Feb 16, 2013, at 1:52 AM, Hans Muller wrote:

> 
> 
> On 2/14/13 8:31 PM, "Jacob Rossi" <Jacob.Rossi@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
>>>>> So authors can easily code to Pointer Events and their content just
>>>>> works no matter what input hardware is being used.
>>> The specification's scope seems to be focused on touch, pen, and mouse
>>> input. Is it really necessary to lay claim to all input hardware?
>> 
>> Touch, pen, and mouse are the examples given. But it is certainly a goal
>> to have compatibility/extensibility for other devices.
> 
> The PointerEvent interface provides explicit support for touch, pen
> devices, and it inherits support for mouse input.  I agree that all
> sources of "pointer" input are likely to have some attributes in common
> with PointerEvent and one can always compatibly add more by extending the
> interface further. You could similarly justify the same claim about
> MouseEvent and in fact that's the role the existing mouse input system has
> played in this spec. In my opinion, suggesting that a new API will be
> compatible with or extensible to all pointer input hardware from now
> forward, overstates what's practically possible or even useful.

There should definitely be something for "pointing devices" - which I don't have
a good wording to explain, "remote" might be one possibility, although it does
sound a bit too distant to be a native input device.

Commercial examples would be the a Wiimote, or a [1] Freespace remote which is
used in some TVs nowadays.

One extra thing is - differentiating multiple input devices, which doesn't seem to
be covered in the spec - it came to mind that this was a potential problem we had
to work around for the Nintendo Wii Browser. (The workaround was to limit access
so the first player is the only one that can interact with the browser. Not really great.)

Not a extremely common use case, but it's something that should be worth considering
for consumer devices that allow multiple controllers. (i.e. game consoles)

Additionally, the wording "pen" could be confusing - certain devices (i.e. "phablets")
come with "pens" but there is no reliable way to differentiate if a pen is being
used or not - technically, I would imagine (drawing tablet == pen) - but I'm not
sure how that will appeal to the audience who doesn't have to actually deal with
the lower level implementation.

-- 
Sangwhan Moon, Opera Software ASA

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWnKiAPs_Y0

Received on Friday, 15 February 2013 18:39:59 UTC