Web-Facing Change PSA: Light dismiss improvements for popovers and dialogs

[Joey Arhar]

Contact emails

jar...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/542

Specification

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11536

https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/pull/460

Summary

Improves and simplifies the light dismiss behavior for popovers and dialogs to fix a few bugs. "Light dismiss" is the behavior where clicking outside of a popover or dialog closes it. The fixed bugs include making scrolling gestures on touch screens no longer trigger light dismiss and making right clicks no longer trigger light dismiss. The underlying mechanism of this change is that the browser will use click events to trigger light dismiss instead of a combination of pointerdown and pointerup events.

Blink component

Blink>HTML>Popover

Web Feature ID

popover

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

I believe that interop and compat risk is low because other browsers and spec editors have been receptive to fixing this bug despite the very slow spec review process. I have announced multiple times that we are going to ship this change in WHATWG meetings and the spec PR several months ago.

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

Ergonomics

This is not a new API

Activation

It will not be challenging for developers to take advantage of this bug fix immediately

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes
https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/popovers/popover-light-dismiss-contextmenu.html https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/popovers/popover-light-dismiss-touch-scroll.html

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/408010435

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	153
DevTrial on desktop	145
Shipping on Android	153
DevTrial on Android	145
Shipping on WebView	153

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/6209615938322432

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.