[pointerevents] Differentiate single click event and double click event (#582)

jimmywarting has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents:

== Differentiate single click event and double click event ==
I found [this](https://stackoverflow.com/a/60177326/1008999) solution to work <s>the best</s> okey among a few answer on [SO](https://stackoverflow.com/q/5497073/1008999)

```js
const button = document.getElementById('button')
let timer
button.addEventListener('click', event => {
  if (event.detail === 1) {
    timer = setTimeout(() => {
      console.log('click')
    }, 200)
  }
})
button.addEventListener('dblclick', event => {
  clearTimeout(timer)
  console.log('dblclick')
})
```

However it isn't perfect. it can still log both click and dbclick sometimes if you click somewhat slow & fast. The problem with all of the other solution i found where that they use a custom setTimeout delay. 

> Implementations MUST maintain the current click count when generating mouse events. This MUST be a non-negative integer indicating the number of consecutive clicks of a pointing device button within a specific time. **The delay after which the count resets is specific to the environment configuration.**

if you can't match the environment delay then you can't reliable differentiate single click event and double click event.
I think a event is needed to know when UIevent.detail resets to 0 again.

I would want to have a single event that dispatch when consecutive clicks stops counting that tells you how many click you did.
```js
button.addEventListener('consecutive-clicks-end', event => {
  console.log('you clicked on this button ' + event.detail + ' times')
  console.log('next click event will have a detail count of 1')
}, { once: true })
```

The only other solution is to build a own detail counter from scratch with your own debounce function

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/582 using your GitHub account


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Received on Monday, 12 January 2026 22:01:22 UTC