Should pointerId be an integer?

There's a lot of different things in Alex's e-mail, so it might help to
break this up.  Here let's talk just about the semantics of pointerId.  Why
is it defined as an integer, and why is the value '1' reserved for mouse?

I've seen some (rare) problems with the touchID in TouchEvent due to
differing semantics.  In particular, iOS uses a monotonically increasing
count, and Chrome uses a contact counter (eg. touch, release, touch is ID
#2 on iOS, but #1 on Chrome).  This causes, for example, my silly paint
test application (www.rbyers.net/paint.html) to behave differently on the
two platforms (it uses a dumb heuristic to color each active touch
differently).

For this reason, I like Alex's suggestion of making pointerId an opaque
identifier rather than an integer.  Alex, Is there precedent for that
pattern elsewhere?  I don't think this is likely to be a significant
problem in practice, so I'm loathe to do anything too weird or surprising -
it's not clear the small benefit would justify doing something more
conceptually complicated.

Thoughts?
  Rick

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Alex Russell <slightlyoff@google.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I had a chance to sit down with Rick Byers while he's been visiting London
> and review the current draft of the spec from a JS/layering perspective.
> What follows is are non-linear comments from the discussion.
>
>
>    - The spec should lead with examples, i.e., move Section 9 to where
>    Section 2 is now.
>    - pointerId is very strange. 3.1 suggests that mouses must have an ID
>    of 1, but there's no other reasonable scenario for using integer values
>    (what does zero mean? 30?). Having an opaque object instead feels like
>    it'll satisfy the needs for identity comparison and for passing through to
>    setPointerCapture()
>    - I'm concerned about the extensibility storay (see below for a
>    related discussion of the layering question): if someone plumbs a new,
>    exotic type of input device through an OS and browser to the page, it's
>    natural for pre-standards additions to the ecosystem to want to pass extra
>    metadata along. The current spec doesn't have an advertised slot for "extra
>    metadata goes here!". This is dangerous in the long-run as it suggests that
>    the objects/events either shouldn't be extended (likely wrong) or extended
>    on the event object directly, creating naming collision hazards later. I'd
>    like to see an extraData slot specified on these event objects,
>    defaulting to null, that can be used for this. When new pointer types
>    become prevalent, this group can observe fields from these objects and
>    standardize them in the primary event object.
>    - The buttons field is painful as bitfield math is anything but
>    natural in JS. That it's pre-existing on MouseEvent seems the only
>    virtue. Consider this a note that users are likely to cringe, not an
>    objection or suggestion.
>    - The new touch-action CSS property seems to have conceptual overlap
>    with the pointer-events property<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/pointer-events>.
>    If nothing else, the naming (and explicit callout to "touch" in the naming)
>    creates huge ambiguity. Anyone who wants to allow some clicks through, but
>    not dragging, is likely to find themselves wading through multiple
>    properties who interaction is ambiguious at best. I haven't though hard
>    enough about this to know if the properties can (or should) be merged, but
>    it seems like an exercise the WG should attempt, if only to identify a
>    strong argument against merging them.
>    - navigator.maxTouchPoints seems deeply touch-specific. Also, is it
>    dynamic? If I plug in a touchpad that support 5 or 6 (and I've only had 1
>    or 2 before), what (if anything) happens? Also, isn't this a fingerprinting
>    risk? Why not make this a property of the events to solve both?
>    - Section 8 makes me terribly nervous that, for all the clarity in the
>    introduction about the event funnel in the introduction, the WG does not
>    have  firm conceptual model for wether or not the spec is describing a
>    high-level or low-level event source. In particular:
>       - Synthesizing mouse events, while possibly a reasonable thing to
>       do in an event sink like the implicit controller that Pointer Events
>       defines, seems to imply that mouse events are not a lower-level event type
>       out of which pointer events are created.
>       - The hover generation in 8.2 is particularly disturbing. If
>       pointer events are conceptually a high-level synthesis of lower-level event
>       sources (a filter, if you will), then perhaps there is room to generate
>       high-level (synthesized) mouse events, but the MouseEvent spec conflates
>       very low-level events (down, move, up) with high-level synthesized events
>       (click, enter, out). To get some sanity here, splitting mouse (and other
>       types of pointer) events into low-level synthesized events and specifiying
>       how pointer events layer into this world seems like the only reasonable
>       thing to do.
>       - We may need to continue to specify that pointer events syntesize
>       other sorts of events, but it should be possible to generate low-level
>       events in JS and have Pointer Events synthesize these events for them too.
>
> Thoughts?
> Regards
>