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

From: François REMY <francois.remy.dev@outlook.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 20:43:30 +0200
Message-ID: <DUB130-DS26F338ED2F183FC56E8F05A5470@phx.gbl>
To: "Oren Freiberg" <oren.freiberg@microsoft.com>, "Rick Byers" <rbyers@chromium.org>
Cc: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>, "CSS WG" <www-style@w3.org>
> >I think a less error-prone approach to separating them is to have 
> >separate boolean rules, eg. 'fine-pointer' and >'coarse-pointer'.  This 
> >is >also more extensible (eg. what if we decide there's another option 
> >than just coarse >and fine, 'both' would be pretty confusing <grin>).
> You make a good point and I can both agree with it and align with this.

Fwiw, I think this could possibly be a mistake; it looks like a 
reincarnation of the problem Pointer Events tried to solve, put another way.



Wouldn't it be better to have

    primary-pointer: (fine || coarse) && (has-hover || has-no-hover)
    any-pointer: (fine || coarse || fine && coarse) && (has-hover || 
has-no-hover || has-hover && has-no-hover)

    - where "primary-pointer" returns the value of the most convenient input 
method (and opposite values are therefore mutually exclusive),
    - and where "any-poiner" returns the combination of the flags that match 
any of the enabled input methods without distinction.

?



That way, we can detect "touch support on laptops" or "digital pen input on 
tablets" using "any-pointer" while still keeping the site-optimization task 
simple using "primary-pointer".



Exposing both properties enables more complex scenarii like making "enable 
touch interface" button visible when "@media(any-pointer: coarse)" but 
enable the coarse mode only when either "this button is toggled on" or 
"@media(primary-pointer: coarse)". Once browsers support Custom CSS At-Rule, 
this could be as easy as "@media(--ui-mode: coarse)" with a simple JS 
maintaining the state accordingly by listening to the related events (while 
we wait we could use a css class on the root element). 
Received on Monday, 28 April 2014 18:43:56 UTC

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