Yeah, lack of support for different input media has been a real pain point for me—most of the developers of these things have mice only, and don’t stop to bother about touch or pen input. I use a Surface Book which has mouse, touch and pen, and I like to
use all three forms at various times.
If you’re trying to do touch and pen on non-web platforms, things tend to be very messy if you want to handle all three types of pointers optimally.
But browser support spotty? I find the pointers events API a marvellous abstraction over platform differences, doing the right thing automatically for >99% of cases, and making the remaining cases possible. The only thing I feel it actually lacks is standardised gesture support for touch. I wrote a simple pressure-capable drawing app a couple of years back in the very early days of pressure-sensitivity (back when Edge was the only browser on Windows that supported it, so I targeted Edge only until other browsers got it), and I found it a refreshingly straightforward system to work with. And since then, everyone implements things like tilt and pressure.
So I’m curious to hear what you’re quibbling over, as someone that’s been using this stuff in anger more recently than I.
