Haptics is technology to apply tactile feedback to user's sense of touch to emulate natural feel as feedback to an action (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology). With touch UI, the simplest use of haptics is to provide sensory feedback with vibra when clicking a link or pressing a button. Technologies are available to simulate more realistic feel of physical keys or buttons.
On a mobile touch device, the user experience can be significantly improved by using haptic feedback. Haptic feedback is commonly implemented to predefined HTML components like <button>, but the challenge for a web developer is that there is no way to apply haptics to custom javascript components. Implementing feedback through a simple javascript api is challenging as the feedback needs to be instantaneous with substantially less than 100ms delay. The feedback pattern of an active web element can be considered as part of the style of the element. Another view is that tactile feedback can be considered just as part of the accessibility paradigm. It is our view that tactile feedback is an essential part of accessibility but not just accessibility and therefore both haptic-specific interface is required and it needs to work in the context of the accessibility framework. For a web developer, CSS is the most straightforward way to implement custom javascript components with tactile feedback and the Web Accessibility Initiative has produced a specification for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, WAI-ARIA ( http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/) As the first step, we have defined the haptics feedback through CSS stylesheet extensions. The proposal is part of the Starlight project work and can be found at http://starlight-webkit.org/haptics/ The haptics implementation contains CSS declarations, modification to event handler and haptics plugin interface. Event handler recognizes when element is pressed or released and reads value of CSS property and the haptic feedback is played via a native plugin interface. Thanks, Jukka Raninen _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
