Comment by Michael Gilley on "Should Apple allow websites to access the new Touchbar on the MacBook Pros?"

CommentShould Apple allow websites to access the new Touchbar on the MacBook Pros?

Michael Gilley

Frontend Engineer at Zapier

Nov 1, 2016

No! lol Even though this would be a neat experience on the new Mac it would ultimately mean a step backwards into vendor coding. Being that the top bar is brand new (and thus its success is not yet certain) I think time could/should be spent elsewhere. For example, more controls/gesture events for full touch screens. :)

Mario Giambanco

Director of User Experience Development

Nov 1, 2016

CSS and HTML has been and are notorious for vendor specific coding for as long as I can remember - really, is this any different?

Emil Moe

Senior Data Engineer

Nov 1, 2016

It is at least another vendor stupidity, @mgiambanco, so I hope it won't happen

Michael Gilley

Frontend Engineer at Zapier

Nov 1, 2016

@mgiambanco "others are already doing it so is this any different"? No, it's not any different and that's precisely why it shouldn't be done. We are trying to get rid of vendor-specific code so that engineers have to rewrite feature code as little as possible to suit each vendor platform. (See HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Design) This might be feasible for Browsers like Safari to support, e.g., by placing a copy of the <nav /> in the Touchbar. But I don't see any real benefit of creating an entire, vendor Web API just to support this hardware feature that is likely transitory anyway.

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