Pointer Events Working Group

The mission of the Pointer Events Working Group is to provide methods to enable simple device independent input from pointing devices such as mouse, pen, and multi-touch screen.
 
Web browsers can receive input in a variety of ways including mouse, touch, and pen input. A “pointer” is an abstract form of input that can be any point of contact on a input surface made by a mouse cursor, pen, finger, or multiple fingers.
 
Pointer Events provide support for handling mouse, touch, and pen input for web sites and web applications through DOM Events. For example, a content creator using Pointer Events would only have use a single model, rather than separate code paths for mouse events, touch events, and pen-tablet events, making authoring content much more efficient and inclusive.
 
This Working Group seeks to enhance the features delivered in the Pointer Events Level 1 Recommendation by exploring changes, such as:

• Addition of direction-specific values for finer-grained control of panning touch behaviors
• Reduction of hit-testing via implicit capture
• Additional clarifications of API behavior and performance optimizations