#553: Pen Events API
Discussions
2021-01-Kronos
Rossen: This issue hasn't had much engagement by the authors since it was opened. I reached out the them yesterday in hope we will get them to respond.
Ken: That's right. Also, they indicated that issues should be opened against their repo.
Rossen: Correct. I'll go ahead and transfer the issues there and expect more details.
2021-05-Arakeen
Rossen: It looks like they got back to us instead of their repro. The last comment attempts to address all previous questions at the same time. ... First concern was about aligning the button click with mouse click events which have down/up capability. The answer was that this is a limitation of the current hardware. ... From reading the explainer it seems that this might be related to piping the up/down events through pointer events?
Sangwhan: If this is the case I'm not sure why this isn't just using the pointer events instead?
Rossen: This is a valid point and we should just ask for further explanations.
Sangwhan: The next part about the connect behavior, the response looks very specific to the Windows platform. I'm not sure the behavior of the Windows Shell makes sense to be exposed to the web.
2022-01-31
Dan: this goes way back.. Recently the requester got back with more information
Sangwhan: Design been ossified...
Dan: so should we close? Should we say we're not satisfied because they won't make changes? Are they fundamental or API shape?
Sangwhan: API shape.. pointer events already exist, but they're using a different delivery mechanism for button events. You have to listen to a different set of events, seems inconvenient. They say it's a better semantic match to mint a new set of events. Pen buttons are a very specific use case. I'm not sure we warrant that. But it's not the end of the world.
Dan: sounds like resolution ambivalent? And a closing comment with those points.
Sangwhan: they're imposing a windows specific implementation detail into the api surface. I can write a closing comment.
Dan: we could say we don't think it w ould be harmful but we think it could be better and we're disappointed our feedback hasn't been received
Thank you for getting back to us, and apologies this took so long. While we aren't entirely satisfied with the outcome of the discussion, we also would prefer not to block work from happening. If you have future iterations which warrants a second round of reviews, feel free to request us to reopen. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
closed with above comment and status of ambivalent
OpenedAug 25, 2020
Saluton TAG!
I'm requesting a TAG review of Pen Events.
Some digital pens and pencils can not only provide input through their interaction with a digitizer but can also pair with a device so that additional signals can be received when a button is pressed. In some cases, the signal may relate to the pen or pencil but come from another source, e.g. a charger may send a signal that the pen or pencil has been docked or undocked. Native applications can use these signals to customize their behavior, but no corresponding events are available to web applications. Providing these new pen event primitives would enable web applications to achieve parity with native applications.
Further details:
We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as (please delete all but the desired option):
🐛 open issues in our GitHub repo for each point of feedback