Pointing the Way Forward
developers.google.com
Pointing the Way Forward
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#2Finally!
'Pointer events' originated at Microsoft, after the W3C effort to standardize Apple's 'Touch events' became uncertain due to patent issues. For a while, despite admitting it's a more elegant spec for unified input, Google were reluctant to add it because Apple wasn't interested [1][2].
Now Google have changed their mind once more and shipped this, making Apple the only major outlier. The pains of shimming these similar-but-different APIs will continue for a bit, but hopefully Apple will make this concession in the end.
[1] https://timkadlec.com/2015/02/apples-web/
[2] https://mobiforge.com/news-comment/who-wants-pointer-events-...
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#3I was one of the people who was really raging at Google when they announced that Chrome wouldn't support PE (with that infamous "No argument that PE is more elegant" comment), so it's only fair that I thank them sincerely for them doing the right thing and making a 180 on this. Good job.
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#4Finally! 'Pointer events' originated at Microsoft, after the W3C effort to standardize Apple's 'Touch events' became uncertain due to patent issues. For a while, despite admitting it's a more elegant spec for unified input, Google were reluctant to add it because Apple wasn't interested [1][2]. Now Google have changed their mind once more and shipped this, making Apple the only major outlier. The pains of shimming th…
>making Apple the only major outlier
That does seem to be a theme with web technologies and Apple recently.
I hope their recent work on Safari 10's compatibility continues.
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#5Finally! 'Pointer events' originated at Microsoft, after the W3C effort to standardize Apple's 'Touch events' became uncertain due to patent issues. For a while, despite admitting it's a more elegant spec for unified input, Google were reluctant to add it because Apple wasn't interested [1][2]. Now Google have changed their mind once more and shipped this, making Apple the only major outlier. The pains of shimming th…
How difficult would a TE -> PE library be to build?
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#6Finally! 'Pointer events' originated at Microsoft, after the W3C effort to standardize Apple's 'Touch events' became uncertain due to patent issues. For a while, despite admitting it's a more elegant spec for unified input, Google were reluctant to add it because Apple wasn't interested [1][2]. Now Google have changed their mind once more and shipped this, making Apple the only major outlier. The pains of shimming th…
How difficult would a TE -> PE library be to build?
You mean like this one?
https://github.com/jquery/PEP/
Was built by the Polymer team before Chrome deprioritized Pointer Events the first time round, and transferred to the JQuery Foundation thereafter.
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#7Back in 2012 with the roll out of the Surface, we wrote our own translation layer to handle unifying mouse+touch input for a game we were working on that never made it to launch.
It's one of those things you just shouldn't have to write. This probably makes a lot of web devs very happy.
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
How difficult would a TE -> PE library be to build?
You mean like this one? https://github.com/jquery/PEP/ Was built by the Polymer team before Chrome deprioritized Pointer Events the first time round, and transferred to the JQuery Foundation thereafter.
Good to know. Thanks!
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#9It's hard to describe just how happy I am to see this! Plus they gave us a free polyfill. f'ing awesome
Re: Pointing the Way Forward
#10In anticipation of this day I added support for PointerEvents to HumanInput months ago:
https://github.com/liftoff/HumanInput
It really is a superior way to handle mouse and touch (and stylus!) events. If you look at pointer.js in the repo you can see how much simpler it is to handle PointerEvents VS the combination of traditional mouse and touch events.