659653 - support touch for our jquery UI elements: signoff2, sliders on graphs, etc

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webtools Graveyard :: Elmo, defect, P5)

Description

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

There are a few UI elements that require drags, which probably break on touch devices. I've came across http://code.google.com/p/jquery-ui-for-ipad-and-iphone/ and https://github.com/furf/jquery-ui-touch-punch, both of which target ipads.

I've asked mbrubeck about what we do with touch events on gecko:

<mbrubeck>	Pike: Fennec 6 has touch events that are compatible with Safari/WebKit/Opera.
<mbrubeck>	Pike: Desktop Firefox on Windows 7 still uses MozTouch* events that are completely different.

Matt, any further tips?

Comment 1

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

For desktop Firefox, normal mouse event handling should work even on a touch screen - there, touch events are needed only if you want to use multi-touch gestures.

For mobile Firefox, you will not get any mouse events when the user drags (because the browser uses that to scroll the page).  You can do one or both of these things instead:

1) Provide alternative interactions that require only clicking.  For example, clicking on a slider to reposition the "thumb."  (Works in all versions of mobile Firefox, and all other common browsers.)

2) Use touch events for dragging gestures. (Works in mobile Firefox 6 and up, and current versions of other modern mobile browsers like Safari, Android, Blackberry, Opera Mobile).

Mobile Firefox implements W3C touch events <http://www.w3.org/TR/touch-events/>.  We currently support single-touch only. (Multiple simultaneous touches will be supported later.)  This is a brand new feature in Aurora, so bug reports are appreciated.

Libraries written for Safari/WebKit's touch events should be compatible with mobile Firefox - if not, please file a bug.  Beware that many such libraries use WebKit-specific CSS (like -webkit-transform) without any fallback for other browsers.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

The production instance of Elmo running on l10n.mozilla.org has been decommissioned as of September 2020, and there are no plans to develop this project further.