[webkit-dev] Force Click events

[Jonathan Rimmer]

[I originally posted this to webkit-help, but Benjamin suggested 
suggested I post here instead]

Hi all,

On Twitter, I was bemoaning the lack of communication re. the recently 
added Force Click events to Benjamin Poulain, and he suggested, probably 
correctly, that I am out of the loop with respect to WebKit development. 
There had, he said, been dicussion of this feature on the mailing lists, 
bugzilla, and the recent contributors meeting.

This therefore, is my attempt to get in the loop on this issue. I was 
wondering if anyone could help me find the following:

Mailing list posts: I have tried searching with the Gmane archive, but 
have been unable to find any dicussions on this issue. It doesn't help 
that Gmane does not support phrasal searches, meaning I cannot easily 
search for "force click", "force touch", "pointer events", etc. Can 
anyone suggest what words I should search for, or direct me to the 
relevant threads?

Contributors meeting: There was apparently a 1 hour discussion at the 
contributor's meeting that lead to the agreement that the Force Click 
experiment should be upstreamed. Is there a video or sound recording of 
this dicussion available? Is there a set of minutes or other summary 
available? A blog post?

Documentation: Benjamin said the feature has been upstreamed to gather 
feedback. Can anyone point me to developer documentation that would 
assist in using/testing the feature? Or something like the Surfin' 
Safari blog posts that introduced the CSS gradient feature?[1]

I am also curious about the decision to develop a non-standard feature 
instead of implementing Pointer Events? The Point Events spec defines a 
"pressure" property on pointer events that seems analagous to the 
"force" property introduced by this feature. Why was a proprietary 
solution pursued instead of adopting the W3C standard? What does the 
Force Click events offer that Pointer Events do not?

Also, how does the development of this feature relate to the WebKit 
project's stated goal of standards compliance? [2]. Is there a plan to 
standardise this events with the W3C? Is it wise to name this feature 
after a marketing term used by a single contributor organisation? Is it 
intended that these features will be interopable with pressure-sensitive 
hardware other than Apple's Force Touch trackpad?

[1] https://www.webkit.org/blog/175/introducing-css-gradients/
[2] https://www.webkit.org/projects/goals.html

Thanks,
Jon