Learning more about Pointer Events as the W3C publishes Last Call Working Draft
On Tuesday February 19, the W3C published the Pointer Events specification as a Last Call Working Draft, a significant milestone in the path towards standardization and interoperability. Begun a little over 3 months ago, the specification aims to help developers more easily enable a new generation of Web experiences that work across input devices, such as touch, pen, and mouse. We’re pleased with the progress thus far in the W3C and wanted to share some of the latest resources available to help you build sites and applications for touch, pen, and mouse input using the APIs available in IE10 today.
Learning about touch-first Web design and Pointer Events
Pointer Events represent a new way to approach input in sites. As such, we want to help developers learn about the technology and how to build compelling experiences with it. Through our engagement with WebPlatform.org documentation, program manager Rob Dolin has added an extensive new primer that walks through Pointer Events and provides basic examples on how to get started.
Additionally, I was pleased to have the opportunity to speak at W3Conf in San Francisco, CA about touch-first design and Pointer Events. If you weren’t able to attend, the talk is available to watch online. This talk covers basic touch-first guidelines, and introduction to Pointer Events, and a walkthrough of migration from mouse events to Pointer Events.
If you’re not inspired yet to try out Pointer Events, here’s a few great Web experiences that use Pointer Events for a touch-first experience, with more to come in the future:
Using Pointer Events Today
IE10 supports Pointer Events (vendor prefixed) and enables you to take advantage of the millions of touch enabled Windows 8 devices in the market. “Same markup” continues to be our goal, and standardization is just one of the ways we’re helping make that a reality. In addition, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (a subsidiary of Microsoft) has been collaborating with the WebKit community to produce an open source prototype patch of Pointer Events for the WebKit project. Web developers can take this early prototype for a spin using a Chromium build with Pointer Events released by AppendTo.
To further help Web developers take advantage of Pointer Events today, David Catuhe from Microsoft France has developed a JavaScript polyfill, called HandJS, to support Pointer Events in multiple browsers. Developers can include the script library in their page and write to the Pointer Event model to get the full experience of Pointer Events in IE10 and a graceful emulation in other browsers. David also has a demo to help you get started.
We look forward to the road ahead in standardizing Pointer Events as the Working Group moves towards the next milestone, Candidate Recommendation.
— Jacob Rossi, Program Manager, Internet Explorer
Comments
Anonymous
February 27, 2013
The publication dates of the articles are messed up? (O_o)Anonymous
February 27, 2013
Open Source? Collab with competitors? Polyfils? Nice new leaf MS.Anonymous
February 27, 2013
Blog comments are still broken! 1.) Please acknowledge the bug 2.) Please fix the bug Nothing else on this blog matters until this is resolved!Anonymous
February 27, 2013
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February 28, 2013
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February 28, 2013
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February 28, 2013
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February 28, 2013
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March 01, 2013
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March 01, 2013
touch api's changed in IE10 for win7 RTM? please see connect.microsoft.com/.../mspointerenabled-returns-true-for-ie10-rtm-on-windows-7Anonymous
March 01, 2013
Can we get Hand.js added to NuGet? http://handjs.codeplex.com/Anonymous
March 02, 2013
@IECustomizer - This is a known documentation bug that is in the process of being updated. IE10 for Windows 7 now supports pointer events for mouse devices. Pen and touch input will continue to simulate mouse input. MSGesture is not supported, but can be feature detected using if(window.MSGesture).Anonymous
March 02, 2013
Is there a plugin/addon to get the Windows 7 theme back for IE10? I'm sorry but this Windows 8 skin is hideous and annoying to use!Anonymous
March 02, 2013
@Mayer -
- Uhm, it looks the same when you open it the second time, however, not heavy at all
- See point 1
- Except that a lot of tests showed us that it is the fastest browser for Windows 7/8
- See point 3
- They will tell you how to build a browser that is destroying the open web. Google is an add company and they should never turn to make a browser, the (mobiele) web is only hurt by it.
- If you lik Chrome so much, go and use it, but you can say goodby to privacy and security.
- See the previous 6 points
- But what's the diffrence with any other browser?
- Those 5 seconds it needs to keep your PC save, is that to much? However, you can simply disable it.
- Done in IE9, or actualy, disabled by default, but that's the case on every browser, except Opera.
- See point 5.
- Yes: rise, dissapear and return.
- Pointless, however, Google isn't serious about Chrome, it's all about getting information from there users, that's how you pay for Chrome: with your privacy.
- See point 3.
- IE9 and higher score 100/100 in Acid3, beside Microsoft doesn't make this things.
- IE10 UI doesn't have any "fancy" effect anymore, good enough?
- You can also just remove all your plugins, beside, the most of the standard options are useful.
- Making points to let it seem you have a lot of points? See poin 17.
- Pointless point, again.
- See point 18 and 19 And for you final, not counted point: "See point 14".
Anonymous
March 02, 2013
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March 02, 2013
@Stefan Don't see the difference with normal mouse click event emulation that often is used on browsers if the users fast touches on screen multiple buttons.Anonymous
March 03, 2013
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March 03, 2013
So he's a "rabid Ms FanBoy Troll" because he doesn't like the chrome UI?Anonymous
March 03, 2013
@Stefan - If the application you're building is zoomable (default), then multi-touch contacts will trigger zoom rather than click. If it's not zoomable, then you should check out the event.isPrimary flag. It's an easy way to build a first-one-down-wins experience, which is probably what you want for your modal interaction scenario. dvcs.w3.org/.../pointerEvents.htmlAnonymous
March 03, 2013
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March 03, 2013
Again there isn't Exclusive Internet Explorer Store like windows ,windows phone. Launch IE store so that All add-ons can be developed for IE.( Wishlist ADBlock first......) reply me.............Anonymous
March 03, 2013
@Mayur Prayag For #8 IE being slow to save pages this is a known bug in IE. When IE goes to save a page it doesn't just copy the source it has already downloaded from the server... It makes a brand new request!!!! This if you just spent 3 minutes downloading the latest sales figures you're going to spend another 3 whole minutes (plus) to save that page! This bug was filed during the beta development of IE7... So although it is extremely annoying... Don't expect a fix anytime soon. I'd look up the status of the bug in MS Connect but since Microsoft has repeatedly deleted all the bugs filed in connect I can't even look it up to tell you the status!Anonymous
March 03, 2013
IF you want to get an HTML5 score then use the W3C HTM5 test suite. It contains 11907 tests www.w3.org/.../Testing That is a real conformance test (although still not complete). IE has addons. Even before firefox and chrome exited. For instance an adblocker can be found here: http://simple-adblock.com/ A store is not required for IE addons However a store can be found here: download.cnet.com/.../internet-explorer-add-ons-and-pluginsAnonymous
March 04, 2013
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March 04, 2013
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March 04, 2013
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March 04, 2013
A major usability issue in IE10 textarea elements (all versions: Windows 7, Windows 8, 32bit/64bit) has been discovered that is a 100% regression from IE9. It was reported as bug #571 over on WebBugTrack webbugtrack.blogspot.ca/.../bug-571-ie-10-textarea-focus-is-broken.html a site which finds and reports many IE bugs (as well as other browsers). I sure hope this isn't just the beginning of a whole mess load of IE bugs due to the new silly Win8 gui controls! @Microsoft - please provide an ETA for a fix on this. My tests indicate that this is not fixable even with the suggested workaround.Anonymous
March 04, 2013
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March 04, 2013
I think bug 571 is from the new UI controls. I also notice the scrollbars is slow to update to the correct size thumscrew when pasting in a bunch of text. In IE9 on windows 7 it was (and still is much faster). We first heard about the TextArea bug from our customers that thought we broke it in our latest app update but we discovered that it is a Microsoft bug. It would be really nice if there were a public bug tracker for IE so we could file bugs like this! (Yes we know about connect we mean a real bug tracker tool!)Anonymous
March 05, 2013
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March 05, 2013
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March 05, 2013
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March 05, 2013
Maybe Microsoft should just disable guest commentingAnonymous
March 05, 2013
I think we can all agree that the comment form bug on this blog is ironically one of the worst bugs it could have and that Microsoft ignoring it is tiresome and disrespectful to the community. @pmbAustin your language and intolerance for others is completely unprofessional. If you have a comment for Microsoft about their browser great state it. If you have helpful advise for fellow developers, great, share it. However if all you can do is whine about other browsers and whine about fellow developers that are pointing out flaws and omissions in the IE browser, the OS it runs on or this blog then you are not helping anyone. As much as we want everyone to participate on this blog if you can't behave properly we will have to respectfully ask that you not return here.Anonymous
March 05, 2013
This is a great post!Anonymous
March 05, 2013
@pmbAustin "log in like everyone else"??? In case you missed it only 2 other people on this post logged in to write a comment so it is actually you that is in the minority. As for the bug just add a real submit button Microsoft! Stop trying to defend ASP technology to the grave. The last browser without tabs was IE6 ever since then web apps have had to deal with this and legacy ASP postbacks simply don't. Time to upgrade your IE6 era code base blog!Anonymous
March 06, 2013
IE10 final still fails test #1 (bug 361) on the "IE fail whale" test.Anonymous
March 06, 2013
On Windows 7 IE 10 there is a chunk of "randomness" at the end of my user agent string: ";EIE10;ENUSWOL" What is this? I thought Microsoft was going to stop stuffing garbage into the user Agent string?! On Windows 8 I don't have any of this "mini-puke" in my userAgent.Anonymous
March 06, 2013
What is the status of SSE ? when are you planning to implement it ? server sent dom events i mean, using new EventSource().Anonymous
March 06, 2013
I just checked my windows 7 IE10 and its just "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/6.0)"Anonymous
March 06, 2013
Hey little brat! Where are you getting this disinformation? IE's UA string is just fine. So shut your gob and get back to your video game.Anonymous
March 06, 2013
@steve - Installed applications can add stuff to the user agent string. Like when you install the .NET framework. it adds something like "CLR 3.5" or something, so it is probably one of your installed applications and not Internet Explorer itself.Anonymous
March 08, 2013
Regarding the security leak of mouse movements in IE from outside the browser window there is an update from the Spider.io blog about why this is such a major issue. As a user that needs to test web apps and research IE bugs/development info on a daily basis in IE it disturbs me very much that any one of the sites I visit CAN track my mouse outside of the browser even when not focused or even when minimized. Quote ----- There are two other points in Microsoft’s post which we believe are important to clarify. Firstly, the post includes an ambiguous sentence: “There are similar capabilities available in other browsers.” It is important to clarify that other browsers do not leak mouse-cursor position outside of the browser window in the way that Internet Explorer does. Secondly, it has been suggested that exploitation of the vulnerability to compromise login details and other confidential information is “theoretical”, “hard to imagine” and would require “serving an ad to a site that asks for a logon.” This is not the case. Ads do not need to be served to sites requiring login details. Ads need only to be served to some page which is open in Internet Explorer. The page with an embedded ad may be in a background tab. The page may be minimised. You may be using an entirely different application—potentially a different browser or some other desktop application—to log in. As has already been noted on Hacker News, if you were to log in at either this banking website or this banking website using any browser (perhaps using your Chrome browser, for the sake of argument), then you would be vulnerable to attack if you had another page open in Internet Explorer, even if Internet Explorer was minimised. There are many similarly vulnerable sites and applications. Making the problem of deciphering n-edged mouse traces over the keyboards at the two example websites that much easier, these are in a fixed position. A fixed position is not required: identifying an n-edged trace that would constitute a trace over a virtual keyboard is not difficult. But if the keyboard has a fixed position, then this is a problem that Android users know has already been solved with uncanny accuracy: e.g. by swype. To get a better feel for the problem of deciphering mouse traces, we suggest readers of this post try this deciphering challenge. End Quote ----- It would be really nice if Microsoft stopped with the PR babble and actually addressed the bug for what it is. Don't play silly games saying that other browsers have similar issues unless you are going to explicitly point them out! Otherwise that is hearsay and slander. As for all Internet Explorer users - we are still waiting for a patch for this!Anonymous
March 09, 2013
I love this! Microsoft invents new anti-community concept! You have to sign up and login in order to use the most basic functionality of a publicly open blog! It is the best way ever to alienate your customers, users, partners, developers, and future clients! Absolutely awesomely spectacular #Epic #Fail!Anonymous
March 09, 2013
Have you really never seen a blog that doesn't allow guest comments?Anonymous
March 09, 2013
@"@Edward" I think Edward is pointing out the stupidity of having a blog with a seemingly functional guest posting option that doesn't require signin in fact it isn't even shown as an option to sign in - yet the experience posting is horrendous! There is a better than 50% chance that you'll type up a good paragraph or three of response only to see the blog eat your comment because it was programmed incorrectly using inferior legacy technology that should have been put out to pasture over 4 years ago! There's no warning, no option to save a draft, no feature to repopulate the comment field on failure just 100% loss of your effort! If this was a new bug that slipped in for a few days fine but this issue has been broken for years and we are tired of Microsoft ignoring it. A RESPECTABLE software company managing an IMPORTANT blog like this shouldn't be ignoring issues like this they should be all over the fix the second they heard about it. Microsofts reputation is getting killed by silliness like this.Anonymous
March 10, 2013
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March 10, 2013
Chris Wilson, Eric Lawrence and all respectable developers (past and present) at Microsoft want the company to fix its blogs! Please for the love of all things pure just add a REAL SUBMIT button, ASP Postbacks should be banned!Anonymous
March 10, 2013
It help keeping out the trolls who do not want to sign up and thus have their comment eaten regularly.Anonymous
March 11, 2013
I decided to take the plunge and actually sign in to post a comment.... and here it is. Please Microsoft - Can someone with the permission and skill to do so fix this blog once and for all?! It's been broken for ages and should have been fixed years ago. The fix shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to apply yet has held this blog back for longer than I can recall. In addition who is actually in charge of this blog? Knowing this would enable us to send the comments to the owner vs wasting time filling up the blog with comments about how frustrating the blog comment form is so we can focus on things like the IE10 textarea bug that affects all users in IE10 on both Windows 7 & 8.Anonymous
March 11, 2013
social.technet.microsoft.com/.../john%20m%20wood "Biography: I am the Project Manager for the MSDN & Technet Blogs platforms, as well as the TechNet Wiki."