Blink won’t implement pointer events • Hacker News Board

Re: Blink won’t implement pointer events

#61

Post by earp » Mon, Aug 18, 2014, 8:17 AM UTC

dfreedm2 wrote: post #51

earp wrote: post #42

I wonder what will happen with the Polymer polyfills for WebComponents, a technology that Safari also hasn't declared intent to implement. And then I wonder what will happen with the polyfill for PointerEvents that already comes bundled with Polymer, which by the way works great in Safari. But most of all, I wonder what this all means for Polymer PointerGestures, which is exactly what we need around here: https://git…

I actually replaced PointerEvents use in Polymer with https://github.com/polymer/polymer-gestures/ a couple of months ago: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/polymer-dev/ba4aDyOo...

Good info. With no specification to back it up, I might go back to my hand-rolled gestures-style library. I retired it because of imminent standardization, but at this point, it seems as likely to be standardized as everything else. I promise to take PolymerGestures for a spin, though, since I was happy with the coding going into those libs now deprecated. Thanks!

Re: Blink won’t implement pointer events

#62

Post by malandrew » Tue, Aug 19, 2014, 11:41 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #57

malandrew wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I absolutely understand that. I'm talking about one level lower than what web components will enable. I talking about the notion of how we got to the current details regarding web components (I'm hesitant to use the term "spec" since it lends more officialness than there actually is. The entire foundation and architecture of web components has been rushed and there have been attempts to foist that specific featu…

Within the web standards community, is there a cluster of companies/interests supporting the position being advocated above, who are not encumbered by a Google business relationship?

Besides us and the individual developers out there like unconed (Steven Wittens)[0] that truly understand the problem here, I honestly don't know.

I know that the Safari devs are unencumbered and disagree with the Google approach, but I don't know what position they do support as an alternative. I just know that their position does not coincide with Google's position.

TBH, there isn't a whole lot of diversity among those working in this space. There are a lot of developers working on graphics, rendering and layout. There are a lot of developers working on web standards. The intersection of those two groups if plotted as a Venn diagram, is pretty small. After all we really only have a few user agents out there: webkit (safari), blink (chrome), gecko (firefox), servo (?) and trident (internet explorer).

The web would benefit immensely from having many more of the devs in the former group involved. I personally would love to hear ideas and get contributions from developers that work on projects/technologies like qt and wpf.

[0] http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/

Re: Blink won’t implement pointer events

#63

Post by gtjrossi » Tue, Aug 26, 2014, 9:50 PM UTC

teleclimber wrote: post #19

fidotron wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Blink team have simply become the new IE style refuseniks, using mobile performance as the standard excuse. Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft have all been creating new "standard" APIs which no one else implements, yet in order to get best performance on their systems you have to use. If you read the history of that bug someone rightly points out a key thing is MS have to support the pen on surface, and that was as im…

> The Blink team have simply become the new IE style refuseniks Don't kid yourself. Sometimes it's the IE team that refuses to play along. Example: WebRTC. Overall I feel that the cooperation between vendors on standards is quite good. but you can't expect all these mega corps to agree on everything all the time.

On the contrary! I work on the IE team and we're playing along nicely. Google just joined us on the ORTC spec, which Chrome considers to be essentially Web RTC 1.1.

http://www.cnet.com/news/reconciliation-draws-closer-for-sky...

For IE implementation status, follow along here: http://status.modern.ie/webrtcobjectrtcapi

and check out our ORTC prototype: http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/prototypes/obje...

Re: Blink won’t implement pointer events

#64

Post by gtjrossi » Tue, Aug 26, 2014, 9:52 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #2

If it becomes a standard I guess they will reconsider their choice. We are in a weird era where HTML5/web apis kind of succeeded ,making plugins almost obsolete, yet i'm still not sure 5/10 years from now,vendors will still be on that same line.The temptation of implementing proprietary APIs is still huge. Touch events for instance are a still proprietary API.

Pointer Events is a Candidate Recommendation at the W3C http://www.w3.org/TR/pointerevents/

It has 2 implementations (Firefox has implemented in a special branch and is working to port it to their main codebase) and a near complete test suite. Thus it's expected to reach the final Recommendation state soon.

So I don't think the standardization status will change Google's opinion here.

(I edit the PE spec and work on IE)

Re: Blink won’t implement pointer events

#65

Post by gtjrossi » Tue, Aug 26, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

rbyers wrote: post #43

matthewmacleod wrote: post #3

This is interesting, because I'm pretty sure Microsoft is going to go full steam ahead with pointer events. Indeed, they're the only major vendor of a device that supports both mouse and touch (finger AND stylus) events – it's going to be super important to handle those events well. I'm not totally convinced by the Blink argument – the fact that "touch events are here to stay" is irrelevant, given the unifying nature…

> I'm pretty sure Microsoft is going to go full steam ahead with pointer events. Note that even Microsoft acknowledges the "touch events are here to stay" argument: IE mobile now supports touch events: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web...

Yep! We're committed to interoperability and compatibility for sure, and that includes implementing Touch Events. But, we don't see that as a blocker for moving the web forward with better models. Table layout was terrible.

For example, we've built better layout APIs (grid, flexbox, etc). Table layout still exists and is probably "here to stay". But we've nearly eradicated it from the modern web and moved the web into the future of responsive design. We can do this with input too.