RE: [mediaqueries4]Differentiating touchscreen+mouse from touchscreen only scenarios

From: rbyers@google.com [mailto:rbyers@google.com] On Behalf Of Rick Byers
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2014 1:19 PM
To: Tab Atkins Jr.
Cc: François REMY; Oren Freiberg; CSS WG
Subject: Re: [mediaqueries4]Differentiating touchscreen+mouse from touchscreen only scenarios

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com<mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Rick Byers <rbyers@chromium.org<mailto:rbyers@chromium.org>> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Oren Freiberg <oren.freiberg@microsoft.com<mailto:oren.freiberg@microsoft.com>>
> wrote:
>> It seems Rick felt we should match both but it looks like Chrome never
>> implemented it. Rick do you still feel the same way and plan on implementing
>> a solution that supports matching both fine and coarse on a hybrid device?
>>
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Apr/0534.html

>
> I'd like to yes, but I didn't want to change anything here (or even finish
> our implementation of this feature) until this was reflected in the spec
> (indicating there was some kind of consensus here).  My understanding from
> my last discussion with Tab was that he planned to update the spec to
> explicitly state that setting BOTH coarse and fine was OK when multiple
> input devices are considered 'primary'.
That was done some time ago, btw. ^_^

Oh awesome, I never noticed that this happened:
   "if there are multiple reasonable "primary" input mechanisms with different characteristics, UAs may make the feature match multiple values.  "

Great, thank you!

> In general I haven't heard much interested from other vendors on these MQ
> features, so I've been hesitant to commit ourselves beyond the minimal
> pointer:coarse support we added.  If IE was interested in these, I'm sure we
> could quickly come to an agreement on behavior that we'd both implement :-)
And if y'all agree on something more specific than what the spec
currently suggests, please let me know so I can spec it.

Sounds good. I was thinking we'd start by always setting 'coarse' on Android, 'fine' on Win/Mac/Linux/ChromeOS if a mouse/trackpad is detected, and 'coarse' on Win/Linux/ChromeOS if a touchscreen is detected.  Does that sound reasonable?  Can anyone comment on what IE might like to do?


Again I think we might want to refine this over time (eg. we know some fraction of touchscreen laptop users almost never use their touchscreen, maybe we should detect them and report only 'fine' for those), so the spec shouldn't be too prescriptive.  But I think it's reasonable to start by just reporting what devices we've found to be present.


I was thinking of one of two approaches below.

1. We won't report touch on hybrid devices where it isn’t the primay form of input.

It seems easier for a web dev if we just don’t report the coarse experience on these hybrid devices. The touch experience is also typically not the most used form of input.


So on Win/Linux/ChromeOS where both a touch screen and track pad are detected ‘fine’ would be reported.



2. We will report both coarse and fine.

This provides the most information which can be good for websites that are way better for one experience over the other.



The hybrid device experience is important to us so reporting just coarse on a hybrid device doesn’t sit well right now. The concern is those devices might get a mobile optimized experience.



Thanks

Oren