MouseEvent: buttons property

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/buttons

by keepamovin • 2 years ago

8 11 2 years ago

developer.mozilla.org

willvarfar• 2 years ago

Is there something specific or quirky that we should be paying attention to?

Mozilla dev docs are great, nice to see them getting to the top of HN :)

But why just MouseEvent.buttons?

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

I thought the interesting thing was how it's a bitmask (a bit rare in IDL attributes / DOM properties). Also I was unaware there were 4th and (shock) 5th buttons for some mouses. So theoretically there's 32 possible states of pressing such a mouse.

I wasn't aware JS surfaced this "multi touch" capability for buttons, as the bitmask indicates which buttons were pressed "at the same time" for whatever the event is (mouse/pointer down etc). Just thought it was cool and a little rare.

Nice digging into the MDN docs and discover new parts of the DOM. Like a new room in a giant familiar house! :) For me at least haha :)

neallindsay• 2 years ago

On Mac OS X 10.5, the buttons attribute always returns 0 because there is no platform API for implementing this feature.

Is that right? And is it just specifically 10.5?

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

I get the right buttons values in Sonoma latest. Not sure about older :)

deweller• 2 years ago

For those who aren't readily familiar with Mac OS X versions, OS X 10.5 is very old and became unsupported as of 2011.

mauvia2• 2 years ago

I feel like the bit flags structure of this event isn't Javascript-y because javascript doesn't support int primitives. Wonder why they didn't translate it.

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

I think it's elegant actually. Appropriate and a nice link with "device driver" stuff from the past. :) haha

At least they didn't overcomplicate it. I shudder to think of: MouseEvent.MIDDLE_BUTTON_PRESSED etcs.

mauvia2• 2 years ago

It could work as an Array if javascript supports C++'s small-buffer-optimization on the backend.

phito• 2 years ago

how is a magic "4" better than MouseEvent.MIDDLE_BUTTON_PRESSED?

MouseEvent: buttons property

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