Should there be a mechanism to cancel touchstart events?

[RByers]

Today it looks like PointerEvents only ever calls preventDefault on touchmove events.

There are scenarios where developers call preventDefault on touchstart today. The most compelling scenario is perhaps as a way to disable the long press affordance we have in chrome desktop before dispatching a contextmenu event. If Chrome were to implement pointer events natively, we'd probably make cancelling a pointerdown do that (although a CSS-based mechanism may be better).

Should PointerEvent have some way of cancelling the underlying touch event? Maybe even a 'cancelOriginalEvent()' method or something - would be a bit of a hack, but probably better than the alternative of the developer having to add a touch event listener.

There's an equivalent mouse scenarios as well that I haven't looked into as deeply. Eg. calling preventDefault on mouseDown disables text selection, and so should calling it on pointerdown. Does that already work?

[RByers]

Note that IE10 relies on a propritary MSHoldVisual event that can be cancelled to suppress their long press aforance: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673557(v=vs.85).aspx#pointer_events.

[dfreedm]

I'm totally sold. Currently testing this in a branch.