[whatwg] [web-apps] Ability to treat transparent part of element transparent to events

[martijn]

Jonas Sicking wrote:

> Having an element not recieve events at all would be a pretty big 
> change to the event model since you'd change the capture and bubble 
> phases of the event. What would be the use for this? Simply don't 
> attach eventlisteners to the element if you're not interested in 
> events that reach it. Could you describe a usecase please.

No, sorry, I can't. The discussion was heading in an other direction 
than I planned. I haven't really thought about this case. It's probably 
not useful, I guess.

> However making elements, or parts of them not be considered when it 
> comes to finding what event to target when a certain pixel is targeted 
> in a visual renderer I can understand. Especially treating transparent 
> parts as 'not there' can be usefull. Is this maybe what you ment? If 
> so I do indeed think the SVG css-properties would be a good starting 
> point, though at least some of them needs to be done a little less 
> SVG-ish.

Yes, this is what I meant.

> I don't really know enough about how screenreaders or speech UAs work 
> to say if this would be usefull to them, or how it would work.
>
> Note though that transparent parts can be tricky when it comes to 
> text. You probably don't want just the actual drawn pixels of the text 
> to be clickable, but rather the general area that is covered by text. 
> This 'general area' needs to be defined though.

Well, I can't see the problem here. If you want pointer events on the 
general area that is covered by text, than simply not define the 
proposed property that would make the element transparent to pointer 
events for transparent area's of the element?
Or am I missing something here?

> Also, I'm not sure if the WHATWG mailing list is the appropriate 
> forum. This more sounds like something for the w3c CSS WG or the 
> DOM-Events WG. Unfortunatly I don't think the DOM-Events WG (nor any 
> other DOM WG) exists any more. 

Yes, you're right. Please, feel free (you or anyone else) to post a 
message about it there.

Regards,
Martijn