[webkit-help] Force Click events

Fri May 8 12:49:59 PDT 2015

On 5/8/15 3:00 AM, Jonathan Rimmer wrote:
>
>
> On 2015-05-07 21:21, Benjamin Poulain wrote:
>> Hi Jon,
>>
>> Beth does not participate on webkit-help. Can you move this discussion
>> to webkit-dev?
>>
>> I have one answer below. Beth can better answer the technical questions.
>>
>> On 5/7/15 1:17 AM, Jonathan Rimmer wrote:
>>> 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?
>>
>> You probably misunderstand what force click is. It is a second level
>> of click as you keep pressing on a trackpad (it is a "deeper" click).
>> The animations between the first and second clicks are driven by the
>> difference of pressure between the two.
>>
>> Pointer Events does not have any semantic that work with force click.
>> The "pressure" property on PointerEvent is pretty much useless in this
>> context.
>>
>> To make things worse, the way it was spec'ed does not correspond to
>> the way the hardware works.
>
> I understand the purpose of force click, but what you're describing
> sounds like a subset of what pointer events provides. Force click
> provides a normalised 'force' property between 0 and 1, and pointer
> events provides a 'pressure' property between 0 and 1. Based on the
> event descriptions in the webkit bug, it seems like there is a mapping
> between the semantics of force click and the more general ones of
> pointer events:
>
> webkitmouseforcewillbegin: pointerdown/pointermove with pressure 0.49
>
> webkitmouseforcechanged: pointerdown/pointermove with pressure 0.5
> (regular click) or 1.0 (force click)
>
> webkitmouseforcecancelled: pointerup after pointerdown/pointermove with
> pressure 0.49
>
> webkitmouseforcedown: pointerdown/pointermove with pressure 1.0
>
> webkitmouseforceup: pointermove with pressure 0 after previous
> pointermove with pressure 1.0
>
> webkitmouseforceclick: pointerup after pointerdown/poitermove with
> pressure 1.0 on the same element.
>
> It seems like a small JS library on-top of pointer events could easily
> have provided the force click semantics without needing an entirely new,
> and as yet non-standard, feature that is only supported by a single
> browser engine. If there are problems that I have missed, are they
> really so severe that no amount of enhancement or modification to the
> pointer events spec couldn't have addressed them?

Now I really don't understand what you think Force Click is, this makes 
no sense.

It's probably best you read some of the documentation/articles online.

> I'm confused by your comments on the spec. Specs are developed in
> public, and vendors have an opportunity to contribute and provide
> feedback if they feel important use-cases are unaddressed or there are
> other problems with what is proposed. Many contributors to the Webkit
> project are also active in the W3C. Given the close alignment of the
> problem spaces covered by pointer events and force click, wouldn't it
> have been better to improve that specification than to develop an
> entirely new one? Particular one that is so tied to a particular
> implementation of pressure sensitive hardware?
>
> Even if force click is eventually standardised, web developers such as
> myself face further complexity from supporting another type of input
> events, and further fragmentation of the web platform, with different
> browser supporting different standards. One of Webkit's stated goals is
> standards compliance. Disregarding existing specs to go your own way,
> and justifying it with post-hoc complaints about existing spec's
> deficiencies hardly seems in keeping with that goal.
>
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> webkit-help mailing list
>>> webkit-help at lists.webkit.org
>>> https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-help
>>>
>>
>