1431012 - Expose touch events on a trackpad as events to the web app

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Mitar]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20180104101725

Steps to reproduce:

Currently, desktop devices often have a trackpad supporting multiple touch events and even gestures, but those events are not expose to web applications at all. On tablets and other mobile devices this is different with touch events, but it would be great if desktop devices could have something similar.

So I would propose that we expose touch events on a trackpad through new set of events, similar to touch events, but where we would map the trackpad to the currently focused window and map coordinates. So upper left corner of the trackpad would be mapped to upper left corner of the window. It would be like scroll events, where you listen on the window. And you would get coordinates of fingers and and then you could decide what to do about that. It is not perfect, like screen, but still, it would allow you to do thins on the web from desktop.

This is a followup of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=663286

Comment 1

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

trackpad doesn't really map to touch too well. Adding trackpad specific stuff to pointer events might be better.
So, please file a spec bug on https://w3c.github.io/pointerevents/.