I’ve been curious about interface possibilities and limitations of non-desktop environments like my Nokia tablet for a while, especially as they pertain to web. Pen on a touchscreen obviously doesn’t have to leave a “trail” of traversal like a mouse does. You also don’t have several mouse buttons at your disposal.

So I made a simple test page to see how some of more interesting events get caught.

The result on my 770 was quite disappointing while also expected. I’ll summarize it for those who don’t have a tablet. Touching a screen generates mousemove event and sometimes mouseover , but you never get a mouseout event. If touched briefly enough, it’ll also generate mousedown , mouseup and click event in this order.

You won’t get a mousedown and mouseup events until click . If you keep pressing the screen without moving, you’ll get a context menu, but I found no way to get to mousedown on its own. This means it’s impossible to create a “natural” drag and drop, which isn’t surprising, since same movement is already taken by browser for scrolling.

My test was limited to Nokia 770 tablet, but I doubt results would be much different elsewhere (Fry, can you check your tablet?). It would also be interesting to see what iPhone does, but since I don’t have it either, I can’t tell.

Still I’ll need to rethink a widget for website I’m working on and keep this in mind for my next year project.