Re: Call for participation: Online meeting on Gesture Events Standard in Web

Yeah.  From my perspective, what I said about this back in my Google I/O
talk in 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DujfpXOKUp8> (and got the
most applause in the talk for) is still true: this is an area that:

1) We seem unlikely to be able to get broad interop on - both Microsoft and
Apple have consistently said they're unwilling to participate in any
standardization effort in this space for IPR reasons.  In particular,
support on iOS is critical to wide adoption of any touch-focused feature,
and we usually don't ship features
<https://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features> in chromium which aren't on a
plausible path to eventually being interoperable across all browsers.

2) There's (almost*) nothing that a built-in browser API could do here that
a great JavaScript library couldn't. So the value of a W3C spec and
built-in browser implementations isn't that high compared to the
alternative of one widely adopted high-quality gesture library.

So personally I'd expect focusing on building and driving adoption of a
high-quality library/polyfill to be much higher impact (for the laudable
goal of "merging web and mobile apps") than investing in a specification or
browser implementations.

Though if we were to do that, perhaps the fasted path to broad adoption
would be to focus on the existing gesture API shipped by Safari?  If there
was a spec for this API, broad adoption of the API (via polyfill and/or
native Safari-only API), and at least one other engine (Gecko?) interested
in implementing it then I wouldn't be surprised to see implementation
interest from chromium as well (as for touch events in the first place).
In comparison, getting broad adoption for an entirely new API like the one
proposed here seems much harder to me...

But I'm no longer the lead of the chrome input team, so my opinion here
shouldn't count for much in this debate.  +Navid.

Rick

* There are exceptions which should perhaps not be ignored - eg. a page
reliably handing pinch gestures that occur where one finger is inside an
iframe and the other is not.

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 5:20 AM Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 22/05/2018 10:03, 刘大鹏(鹏成) wrote:
> > Hello All,
> >
> >
> > We are planning to organize an online meeting to discuss the proposal of
> > Gesture Events in Web in the MERGING OF WEB AND MOBILE APP COMMUNITY
> > GROUP[1].
> >
> > If you have interest to join the discussion, please provide your
> > feedback of your available time on doodle:
> > https://doodle.com/poll/8acwbp9598uifqgi
>
> Could you indicate what timezone the times are in? EST? UTC?
>
> >
> >       Introduction of native app gesture and /Gesture Events/ in web
> >
> > Smartphone OS normally have Touch and Gesture as a way to interact with
> > users.
> >
> > Touch function is used to capture the information of touch events （e.g.
> > the position of the touch point etc.）happening on the screen.
> >
> > Gesture function is used to specify users’ more complex interactive
> > operation with screen, such as pinching, rotating, swiping,
> > double-tapping and so on.
> >
> > Although Touch is supported by many platforms and the touch events model
> > has been defined in the W3C Touch Events specification [2], Gesture are
> > not widely supported currently.
>
> Not forgetting about W3C Pointer Events
> https://w3c.github.io/pointerevents/
>
> > Nowadays, gesture events are widely used in web. However, web developers
> > can only use Touch Events to implement gesture functionalities. They may
> > have to develop multiple versions of gesture events in order to adapt
> > different browsers due to the lack of gesture events standard in web.
> > Thus, web developers always choose to implement the gesture events by
> > importing external toolkits when they start a new web project.The
> > development effort of gesture functions for every single browser and
> > learning cost for different API and parameters of toolkits result in low
> > efficiency.
> >
> > To solve this issue, we propose to define a Gesture Events standard in
> > W3C, the benefits are:
>
> I'll also note that standardisation of high-level gesture events may hit
> some IPR issues for certain companies (at least that has been my
> experience in the past when broaching the subject).
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
> www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
> http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
> twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
>
>