On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 01:38:28 +0200, Doug Schepers <schep...@w3.org> wrote:

... I'm saying that when DOMActivate was first specced, in 1999-2000, there wasn't a clean mobile-web model or significant use of inputs other than keyboard and mouse, so click seemed to serve content authors just as well as DOMActivate... they didn't need to think as much about an abstraction that covered keyboard, mouse, touch inputs, voice, and whatever, equally well.

That dynamic has since shifted, and there is more need for an activation event... just not necessarily DOMActivate, because of the other problems with it.

For what it is worth, DOMActivate is largely my fault (although credit for good stuff is due to Rich Schwerdtfeger, Al Gilman, Philippe le Hegaret and many others).

The idea at the time was to replace the UI events around at the time with a set that were based on intentions rather than hardware-specific interactions, because I predicted that the existing problems of people building interactions that required a specific hardware paradigm would only get worse over time. I think that came true...

In the meantime, abstract intention-based events were added in parallel. Given the lack of good interoperable implementation and the ability to continue doing what they had done and figuring it more or less worked, Web developers didn't take them up, and the hardware-based events became more and more common.

Meanwhile, browser vendors and others worked to make the hardware-events sort of abstract (being able to fire a click in multiple ways, or adding extensions that synthesised events from a non-WIMP interface). So the abstract events continued to rot.

(Again, that wasn't a surprise, as discussed at the time).

I understand Doug's suggestion (in its strict relationship to this comment) to be "give up DOMActivate as a failure, and accept that the click event has effectively taken the role, for now". The Web APIs group (one of the fore-runners to Web apps) actually resolved that in 2006 at its first meeting, and I think we were right at the time and still do.

Meanwhile, there is now momentum to specify a better approach to events, and make it work. I think that deserves support as the best way to use our energy to get something better.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
    je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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