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In 5.2.3 Mouse Event Types: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#events-mouseevents The last paragraph of this section states: "Implementations must maintain the current click count when generating mouse events. This must be a non-negative integer indicating the number of consecutive clicks of a pointing device button within a specific time. The delay after which the count resets is specific to the environment configuration." Later on, the spec indicates that this should be stored in UIEvent.detail. If nothing else, there should be more information in 5.2.3 about where/how the click count is stored/used. But why isn't this stored in a proper attribute rather than stuffed away in a generic 'detail' attribute?
It has been .details since forever I think. Not sure why'd change that.
Yeah, .detail has been used for that for ages. In theory we could add another property but not sure why.
Having a named property for a specific purpose is better than storing data in a generic catch-all 'data' (or 'detail' in this case) attribute. Code that references something like 'event.clickCount' is self-documenting whereas with 'event.detail' you have to think about what is stored there for the particular event you're looking at. So, a proper attribute name is clearly better, but perhaps it's too late to update this.