Repeating what I said in previous thread: There are real problems with the Touch Events spec, and we need a replacement. One issue is that it is under specified w.r.t its compatibility with mouse events. A concrete example: Should the touchmove event trigger the mousemove event? I believe it does in IE and Firefox, while it does not in Chrome and Safari. This isn't specified anywhere, and can make it incredibly complex to implement something that works with both mouse and touch input. And it is exactly this type of thing that Pointer Events sets out to fix.
This is exactly the same story as with the <meta name="viewport"> tag. Apple did something without releasing a spec, and the others made not-fully compatible copies. That was 8 years ago. No exaggeration: Right now the only(!) thing that works consistently cross platform is setting width=device-width. It is insane, and it hurts the web.
For whatever reason, despite all the standardisation out there, DOM input always has been this massive cross-browser incompatible inconsistent proprietary clusterfuck. quirksmode.org may be known to some of you as this guy's blog, but it is best known for its DOM event compatibility tables, which somehow still matter in 2015.
If browser vendors cannot fix mouse and keyboard, why would they fix touch?
A lot of time has been sunk into trying to fix keyboard especially, but it's a horrible, horrible mess β pretty much whatever you do will break websites, given so many do if (UAx) expect_behaviour_x() else if (UAy) expect_behaviour_y() etc., so even standardising on existing behaviour doesn't work. Then there's fact that some of it is down to locales and what the current keymap isβ¦ :(
This is exactly the same story as with the <meta name="viewport"> tag. Apple did something without releasing a spec, and the others made not-fully compatible copies. That was 8 years ago. No exaggeration: Right now the only(!) thing that works consistently cross platform is setting width=device-width. It is insane, and it hurts the web.