On Thursday, August 2, 2012 6:32:30 AM UTC-7, Gervase Markham wrote: > http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/07/12/ie10-user-agent-string-update.aspx > > IE10 has introduced the Touch token to the UA string, which overlaps in > intent with our Tablet token. > > Dao suggests it would be nice to get cross-browser consistency here. > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=773355 > > This makes some sense to me. "Touch" is more the matter of interest than > the form factor. If we do switch, we should do it before we ship native > > Fennec on tablets. > > Anyone want to argue for or against? > > Gerv
I'm curious why there's a need here? In fact, I think I'd argue that form factor was much more the driving interest behind the entire thing that sparked including "Tablet" in the UA. Mobile wanted the word "Mobile" in the UA on small screen devices and not on tablets in order to differentiate the two. Most sites are still sending completely specialized content to small screen devices. Adapting an estabilished site to a responsive design setup isn't going to be easy for them (nor is it always possible), and they don't want to resort to slow stub page tricks to find out form factor info. "Tablet" was added later when other people became involved (and I argued against it at the time). Touch is a different ball though. Adapting for touch on the fly is (arguably?) much MUCH easier than adapting your sites layout and design for phone vs desktop/tablet. Things sites/we can do to make it better: 1.) Sites can listen for touch events in addition to mouse ones. Its an insignificant bit of extra code, and we should push for jQuery desktop and other widget sets to start supporting touch as well. 2.) We should make sure touch-enabled media selectors are working so that sites can optimize button sizes, layouts, etc. for touch screens if they want. TBH, I haven't seen a strong need for this. Tablets for us are at least 10in devices, and we lay them out at 980px wide by default. With those settings, I've never had trouble with button or link sizes. 3.) We should also provide more reliable script hooks to detect if the device supports touch? Right now I think sites just check for document.createTouch which we turn off on desktop via a pref. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
