W3C

– DRAFT –
PEWG

09 October 2024

Attendees

Present
adettenb, flackr, mustaq, Olga, Patrick_H_Lauke, smaug
Regrets
-
Chair
Patrick H. Lauke
Scribe
Patrick_H_Lauke, Patrick H. Lauke

Meeting minutes

[quick round of introductions for the benefit of Olga and Adam, new WG members joining us from Microsoft]

Limit the precision of floating point event fields w3c/pointerevents#517

Rob: meant to write something up, but as mentioned in previous meeting: location should be at least pixel level; and we need to be careful about potential banding if we artificially limited precision that would then lead to jumps (e.g. pressure)

ACTION: continue iterating, Rob to write up a few thoughts on the issue

Ensure predicted events only use input from the current partition w3c/pointerevents#518

Patrick: i promised that i'd monkey-patch this to at least make it clear what we mean by "past" (i.e. the preceding points of the current gesture/interaction, not "when the user last visited this a few days ago"). suggest i'll do this for next meeting, then we have something to expand further

Rob: also limit it specifically to "current webpage" or similar, be very specific, to make it clear devs won't have more access to things than they should

ACTION: Patrick to make first pass PR to clarify

[PointerEvent algorithms] Order of boundary events w3c/pointerevents#519

mustaq: UI events spec wants to become more algorithmic, and that showed up a few discrepancies with our own handling. this was before TPAC. but at TPAC it was decided that UI events will handle mouse events (?)

<mustaq> https://www.irccloud.com/pastebin/wmpUV7lT/

https://www.w3.org/2024/09/WebAppsWG-TPAC2024-Meetings-Minutes.pdf

mustaq: there are four of these algorithm issues altogether. they're more longer-term. not for Level 3

Olli: agree this is more for Level 4, Next ... post Level 3

Rob: we have clear direction, we just need to make sure it's all handled consistently

Adam: is it that mouse events currently are getting turned into pointer events, for enter/leave...

mustaq: not a problem of event per se, but which spec specifies the behavior

Rob: developers won't see any difference. it's just which order, which timing, events are being fired

[touch actions] handwriting manipulation type to distinguish panning w3c/pointerevents#516

Adam: in short, we need a way to separate handwriting from scrolling behavior

Adam: e.g. an app adds a toggle to explicitly switch between handwriting and regular pointing device for their stylus

Adam: one proposal was to do this as an attribute in HTML. another idea was to piggy-back on touch-action as a new value to differentiate between handwriting and panning

Adam: no way currently to allow granular control

<mustaq> w3c/pointerevents#203

Rob: the way we built stylus on android is that handwriting is equivalent to scrolling (?)

Rob: not sure if 203 is same issue. when you put stylus down, you CAN pan, you CAN write, nothing for author to stop one or the other

Adam: you can only limit pan to one direction, but not completely suppress pan AND allow handwriting

Rob: pan and manipulation might disable handwriting

Rob: problem is that touch action is applied as a bitmask down the tree ... if the parent limits to just panning, for instance, it would then disable handwriting further down

Olga: so we won't be able to enable handwriting on a child if parent has limited to just pan

Rob: if we don't include handwriting as a concept as part of pan

Olga: as Adam pointed out, this might be more a problem for older pages, but not for new ones

Adam: yes, new ones may already take that into account. so adding a new value for handwriting to touch-action sounds like the way to go

Rob: might be worth also thinking about other actions like text selection

Adam: should it be included in the manipulation set?

mustaq: in Chrome manipulation is pan and zoom

Rob: i think it should probably be in manipulation

Rob: we should have some other property to determine whether you want ... how you want to treat these devices, but maybe touch-action is sufficient. in other issue (512) i talk about how we might want to allow mice to pan. that's more a "how to treat this device"

Olga: in future it could allow handwriting with mouse (in ref to 512)

mustaq: in reference to 203, that was a wider idea of moving away from touch-action to a few more specific properties

Olli: is there a situation where you'd also want different pointers/styli to behave differently?

Adam: some styluses support things like a toggle/switch to trigger different behaviors, stylus with eraser. not sure what that would look like

Olga: to be clear, we just want to allow author to specify that they want to allow handwriting with a pointer (stylus, finger) rather than interpreting it as a pan (?)

mustaq: what to do when a device doesn't support handwriting? should it fall back to then allowing pan?

mustaq: what i imagine is a page with lots of inputs, and you want to allow an author to say "for touch, just pan; for pen, make it do handwriting"

Adam: would be good to allow both, but have handwriting take precedence. Would be useful to allow defining different behaviors for different pointer types too

<mustaq> w3c/pointerevents#203 (comment)

mustaq: there's no consensus there, but the issue there mentions this idea of making it more granular / per pointer type

<mustaq> pointer-action: touch(pan-y), pen(none);

ACTION: iterate further on the issue w3c/pointerevents#516 - Adam to flesh out further thoughts/ideas (also in light of 203)

Coalesced and predicted event attributes within an untrusted event w3c/pointerevents#514

mustaq: my concern was that authors may trust the trusted bit too much, even though the list comes from an untrusted event...

ACTION: mustaq to propose a PR with clarification, Olli to review

Ambiguity of the value of the button property for the click event w3c/pointerevents#513

Olli: ...in this case click needs to follow UI events

mustaq: the special case i proposed will be breaking...

Olli: we can't change behaviour, just need to clarify it

ACTION: Patrick to attempt first PR to clarify/document this

Triage unlabelled issues https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues

Meta-issue: update WPT to cover Pointer Events Level 3 #445 w3c/pointerevents#445

mustaq: think we only have one left at this point. Rob landed it, but it was reverted.

w3c/pointerevents#300

ACTION: Rob to review his WPT (and why it might have been reverted)

Summary of action items

  1. continue iterating, Rob to write up a few thoughts on the issue
  2. Patrick to make first pass PR to clarify
  3. iterate further on the issue w3c/pointerevents#516 - Adam to flesh out further thoughts/ideas (also in light of 203)
  4. mustaq to propose a PR with clarification, Olli to review
  5. Patrick to attempt first PR to clarify/document this
  6. Rob to review his WPT (and why it might have been reverted)
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 237 (Fri Oct 4 02:31:45 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: Adam, Olli, Patrick, Rob

All speakers: Adam, mustaq, Olga, Olli, Patrick, Rob

Active on IRC: flackr, mustaq, Patrick_H_Lauke