React 16.4 release notes (pointer events)

[Saaster]

Pointer events integrate inputs from mice, touchscreens, and pens, making separate implementations no longer necessary and authoring for cross-device pointers easier. The one input API to rule them all!

Except... of course Pointer Events doesn't work in Safari. Safari doesn't even support the regular mouse event "buttons" property which has been in the specs forever, which is a constant source of Safari specific bugs in my experience. Nothing happens when you click? Oh, you must be using Safari!

Why is input handling such a pain in the behind!

[localvoid]

> making separate implementations no longer necessary

Until you actually start to implement gesture disambiguation and realize that pointer events are useless [1][2]

1. https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/178

2. https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/216

[BaronVonSteuben]

Safari is the new Internet Explorer

https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/

[swyx]

there are any number of pointer events polyfills (https://www.google.com/search?q=pointer+polyfill). it's not react's fault. this feature will still be there if/when safari gets with the program!

[notheguyouthink]

I'm just excited for https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/27/update-on-async-renderin... , and curious to see how it works in our code.

[deckard1]

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. It's an enormous effort on their part, and for the users with all the API changes.

But Dan's "Beyond React 16" demo simply was not compelling at all for me. With the focus on latency but no mention of bandwidth, it's really hard to understand the full impact on mobile devices. With TCP, throughput decreases as latency increases. Queue up too many requests, and the UI will get more disconnected, not less. Anyone that has had to work on an image gallery knows this all too well. Then you have SSR, and promises from render() that potentially swallow errors... lots of unknowns here.

If all these efforts turn into a wash, or at best a subtle improvement at a cost of relearning React... people are going to be asking if it was worth it.

[globuous]

Absolutely ! Any news on that btw ?

[KeitIG]

Great release. I am still desperately waiting for passive/once events support though. VueJS integrates them in a trivial way:

    <div v-on:scroll.passive="onScroll">...</div>

Would love to have this simplicity in React.

[steipete]

The pointer events contribution comes from PSPDFKit, a company that sells PDF SDKs for mobile, desktop and web. It's used in https://pspdfkit.com/web/

[heshanfu]

A curated list of awesome React Components & Libraries: https://reactjsexample.com/

[pluma]

In the grand scheme of things this sounds like one of the more boring version bumps but I'm sure a lot of people are going to be really excited about this.