Today, the W3C published Pointer Events as a Candidate Recommendation, an important step towards a standard and interoperable way to handle input from touch, pen, mouse, and more. This fast 5-month progression from First Public Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation is a mark of the effective collaboration between Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, jQuery, and others to help sites take advantage of new interactive hardware on the Web.
Candidate Recommendation indicates the W3C considers the specification widely reviewed and satisfying the Working Group’s technical requirements. It signals a call for additional implementations to inform the group. The Pointer Events Working Group is also now actively producing tests to validate implementations of the specification. The recent Test the Web Forward event, sponsored by Microsoft, helped fuel this effort with nearly two dozen new test cases.
Increasingly, consumers browse the web with a broad range of devices; with touch, mouse and keyboard. By using pointer events, developers can write to a unified model that allows sites to be responsive to many types of input. Web developers can take advantage of pointer events in IE10 today, and in other browsers using polyfills like Hand.JS. We’ve also created a new portal on WebPlatform.org to help you learn more and try pointer events out. Pointer Events is one of many ways we’ve made touch fast and fluid on the Web.
Jacob Rossi
Program Manager