Re: Making mouse events less painful to deal with in SVG

I'd love to see improvements in this respect. I agree it is a big hurdle
for most new SVG developers to find out how to get coordinates at a given
spot/depth in the DOM.

Andreas


On Thu, April 30, 2009 3:38 am, Jonathan Watt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been thinking about the problem of mouse event coordinates (clientX/Y
> and
> screenX/Y) being pretty useless in SVG.
>
> The problem is of course that you generally want to know where the mouse
> event
> occurred relative to the userspace established by some element. As things
> stand,
> to get that information authors generally need to get the transform to the
> client area using getScreenCTM, invert that transform matrix, create an
> SVGPoint
> form clientX/Y, then transform that point using their inverted matrix. Not
> surprisingly this is far from obvious to most authors, and people get it
> wrong
> since they think they need to use screenX/Y to match getScreenCTM, or they
> don't
> invert the matrix, and further, zooming screws up the transform anyway so
> that
> things won't work when the page is zoomed.
>
> I'd like to propose that a clean and easy way to solve this problem would
> be to
> extend MouseEvent with a getPointRelativeTo method. Something like:
>
>   Point getPointRelativeTo(element):
>     Returns the location of the mouse event in the coordinate system
>     established by 'element'.
>
> That's far from spec quality text applicable to SVG and HTML etc, but you
> get
> the idea, and I'm just looking for feedback on the idea at the moment.
>
> One question is, should the point returned be in the coordinate system
> established *by* the element, or in the coordinate system established by
> the
> element's parent. I think probably the former. That way it's always
> possible for
> the script to pass in element.parentNode, but if we did it the latter way
> there
> may be no child (yet) that can be passed in.
>
> I think it would make sense that passing in null would get the coordinates
> in
> the userspace established by the nearest outer <svg>, or perhaps just the
> nearest <svg>. Not sure about HTML.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>


-- 
Andreas Neumann
http://www.carto.net/neumann/
http://www.svgopen.org/

Received on Thursday, 30 April 2009 07:36:36 UTC