The mission of the Pointer Events Working Group is to provide methods to enable simple device independent input from pointing devices such as mouse, pen, and multi-touch screen.
 
Web browsers can receive input in a variety of ways including mouse, touch, and pen input. A “pointer” is an abstract form of input that can be any point of contact on a input surface made by a mouse cursor, pen, finger, or multiple fingers.
 
Pointer Events provide support for handling mouse, touch, and pen input for web sites and web applications through DOM Events. For example, a content creator using Pointer Events would only have use a single model, rather than separate code paths for mouse events, touch events, and pen-tablet events, making authoring content much more efficient and inclusive.
 
This Working Group seeks to enhance the features delivered in the Pointer Events Level 1 Recommendation by exploring changes, such as:

• Addition of direction-specific values for finer-grained control of panning touch behaviors
• Reduction of hit-testing via implicit capture
• Additional clarifications of API behavior and performance optimizations