- From: Chris Griego <cgriego@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:28:40 -0500
I've searched through the archives and the specs and have not seen any mention of this. The mouse wheel as a part of input is now a very handy fact of life usually associated only with scrolling up and down, but it has more uses than that and I would like to propose that event handling for wheel mouse scrolling be added to Web Applications 1.0 Two real-world uses in today's in desktop applications aside from scrolling include the iTunes volume slider, just hover your mose over the volume slider and the wheel mouse will increase or decrease the volume, and the Mac OS X (10.3+) application switcher (induced with alt+tab) where the wheel mouse will scroll through the applications. Firefox uses the mouse wheel in scrubbing long menus such as bookmark menus. The mouse wheel could be put to good use in web applications. One use would be within the Google Maps application to freely scrub the map or in Opera Show and the S5 slide show system for going to the next and previous slides. Currently the only way to capture and use the mouse wheel on the web is within the Macromedia Flash v7 plugin which added event handling for the mouse wheel. Flash Documentation: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/mx2004/main_7_2/00001481.html Example Turotial: http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=E81CE There are things to consider when implementing handling for the mouse wheel. You obviously want to handle when the mouse wheel is turned upwards or downwards, but you also need to handle the user agent's speed preference (1 mouse wheel turn is 3 lines versus 1 line, Flash handles this by passing the user agent's preference to the event handler), some mice support back and forth rocking, and the mouse wheel click that toggles to 4-way free scrolling. -- Chris Griego
Received on Saturday, 18 June 2005 11:28:40 UTC