Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

There was an interesting comment made when this was last submitted:

    > Those are really nicely done effects, and I could see finding a use for 
    > some of the effects -- but not triggered on hover, I've pretty much given 
    > up on anything triggered on hover, because of need to support touch.

I never thought about it before this way, but it makes some sense. Are people completely giving up hover-on effects because of this? It'll probably make sites marginally faster to give up effects on hover... so that's 2 reasons to ditch hover-on effects already. Do there still exist good reasons to keep it?

Hover still applies when a touch device is tapped but obviously if the element is a link the page is navigated away from and thus the effect isn't seen. Not all interactions navigate away from the page though so the effects are useful in those cases. And of course, desktop and other devices with cursor capabilities still make use of hover.

While it does still semi-work on mobile devices, frankly it is useless. Trying to trigger hover by tapping on the webpage is just frustrating and overall a bad user experience on mobile devices.

I always hit m.xkcd.com now, never the main site, even when I have a mouse. That hover text was always a pain.

Now you can see the title-text by tap-holding on the image too.

I am pondering whether we could trigger nice hover effects with something else, e.g. gyroscope, on touch-enabled devices. E.g. I wish for the link text to change color when one moves a mouse (on non-touch-enabled devices) or turns the device around (on touch-enabled devices)

This is a full-blown version of what you've described but the concept could be applied to simple hover effects too: http://matthew.wagerfield.com/parallax/

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