Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Maciej thinks touch and mouse are different enough that a common API across the two doesn't make sense, and that devices primarily support one or the other (e.g. he believes the touchscreen on a Pixel and the trackpad on a Surface are just rarely-used gimmicks). He also throws a punch to the effect of "if MS doesn't value compatibility enough to use what we already shipped, why should we try to be compatible with them?"

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2012-December/...

View on HN

Of course Microsoft has now shown the DO value compatibility enough to implement Touch Events, and is even one of the most active members in the Touch Events community group working to improve Touch Events in the W3C.

Also worth noting, for those who don't already know, that Apple has not participated in any of the W3C efforts to standardize Pointer Events or Touch Events.

In fact, Apple worked to hinder the standardization and implementation of Touch Events, by applying for patents on the API and refusing to license them under the W3C patent policy. So it's a bit rich for Apple to criticize other browsers for not implementing an API that Apple was trying to keep proprietary. (Or to chastise other vendors about compatibility when they won't even participate in the relevant standards groups.)

Please show documentation where Apple refused to license under W3C patent policy. From everything that I have seen, things went more like this: Apple was doing due diligence and reported their patents to the W3C. The W3C then abandoned the recommendation process at that time without pursuing patent licensing discussions of any kind with Apple.

> Please show documentation where Apple refused to license under W3C patent policy.

Sure. From the TE-PAG report, Apple expressly excluded its Touch Events patent claims from the W3C patent policy:

    Patent Advisory Groups are formed when patent claims are asserted
    against or expressly excluded from royalty-free implementations of W3C
    Recommendations.  That happened here when Apple excluded certain of its
    patents and patent applications for the Touch Events Specification.

Source: http://www.w3.org/2012/te-pag/pagreport.html

> W3C then abandoned the recommendation process at that time without pursuing patent licensing discussions of any kind with Apple.

Not true. After five months of work, the PAG officially recommended in July 2012 that the Working Group continue developing the Touch Events spec, which it did for over a year before publishing Touch Events as a W3C Recommendation in October 2013: http://w3.org/TR/touch-events/

The PAG repeatedly invited Apple to meetings and requested other information from them; Apple never replied to any of our communications. This is recorded in the document above, as well as the PAG meeting minutes.

Disclosure: I am co-editor of the W3C Touch Events spec, and a member of the Touch Events Patent Advisory Group.

Thank you, I've never actually seen that information compiled in one place.

As far as I can see, touch events are not yet supported in IE: http://caniuse.com/#feat=touch

And also note that the posting on the webkit list is from 2012.

IE11 for Windows Phone supports Touch Events; IE11 for Windows desktop does not. (It's true that at the time of that email, neither did.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web...

The latest IE "tech preview" release supports Touch Events on all platforms, and so do Project Spartan preview builds.

It sounds like Microsoft just added support with an update to only mobile IE11 less than a year ago, which was a year and a half after Maciej's comment quoted by bsimpson that rbyers is responding to.

Yes, that is true.

As someone who's been using Wacom tablets since before the iPad existed, one of the nice things about Pointer Events is that they provide native support for every pointer-based input device. The only way to utilize a tablet on the web before was either

a) through mouse emulation, or

b) with a barely maintained proprietary plugin from Wacom that only worked in JS, at a time when most rich apps were in Flash.

Pressure and tilt on the web will enable a new class of applications that progressively enhance on hardware that's barely been an afterthought until now.

> (e.g. the touchscreen on a Pixel or the trackpad on a Surface is a merely a gimmick)

And he conveniently forgets about devices like the Yoga.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com