click event considered broken

Dear WG,

Section 3.3 of DOM 3 Events currently says that DOMActivate is always dispatched within the default action of the click event. It also says:
> (This section is currently being rewritten.)
In a W3C mailing list discussion (I haven't got the reference handy) it's been pointed out that not all clickable targets are activable, so sometimes not dispatching DOMActivate is appropriate. That change would make click fired both for actual clicks not resulting in activation and as synthesized when activation happens by other means. Such an event would be useless. Until recently I wasn't aware of click being synthetically dispatched by user agents not in response to input from a pointing device - I used DOMActivate consistently to be independent of modality. I believe the original (and currently official) definition of click as just click made sense and I would like to use it as such when appropriate. The current state of matters calls for deprecation (in the sense of [1], not the current ED) of click and introduction of click2 (by analogy to Set-Cookie2) just for real clicks. This may face opposition of some, as the spec is close to finishing, but at the very least a flag in click's context information should tell if the event is real. (Although checking it in almost every handler would be burdensome, use cases for modality specific events are fewer than for generic ones which should be predominantly used.) Otherwise there will be probably no way to handle just real clicks, making pointing devices seriously underprivileged.

Best regards,

Krzysztof
HTML WG

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2009JulSep/0349.html

Received on Saturday, 19 September 2009 19:14:57 UTC