[webkit-dev] Request for position on changing click, auxclick, contextmenu to PointerEvent

[Liviu Tinta]

Hello WebKit-dev,

I'd like to ask for Webkit's official position on changing “click”,
“contextmenu”, “auxclick” events to PointerEvent (instead of MouseEvent) to
let developers:

- distinguish between mouse, pen and individual fingers in a multitouch
interaction through pointerType and pointerId attributes, and

- utilize fractional event coordinates for high precision use cases

There were concerns about compat implications of this change but our compat
study (see below) does not support those concerns.

The "click" and "contextmenu" events were defined as MouseEvents decades
ago when a mouse was the only source of pointer-like events.  The "auxclick"
event was defined similarly only a few years ago.  The ability to
distinguish these events by input source in a multi-pointer environment is
a long-standing developer request (e.g. this MSDN request [1]).
PointerEvents spec discussion [2] reached consensus that it would be a
useful change and also expressed compat concerns [3].

Compat Study

To better understand compat implications, Chrome committed [4] to
experimenting in the wild. Chrome made the change available as an
experimental web-platform feature in Sep 2019, started an experiment in
Canary in Aug 2020, and gradually expanded the scope of the experiment to
cover Canary, Dev and Beta by Nov 3rd 2020. So far there were no related
bug reports.

Related specification changes:

   -

   PointerEvents pending PR [5]
   -

   UIEvents merged PR [6]
   -

   Html pending PR1 [7]
   -

   Html pending PR2 [8]


Mozilla standards-position:
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/455

TAG Review: <https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/537>The TAG
review process is being skipped because this change does not involve a
design decision.

[1]
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d50efbfd-fb96-47d8-86e3-98c0c65409c0/create-event-for-quotmouse-clickquot-and-quottouch-clickquot-separately?forum=winappswithhtml5

[2] https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/100

[3] https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/100#issuecomment-304941643

[4]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pointer-events/2019AprJun/0071.html

[5] https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/pull/317

[6] https://github.com/w3c/uievents/pull/259

[7] https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5324

[8] https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6126

Thank you,

Liviu Tinta
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