WP7/IE Fail: mouseover event on tap
Mobile browsers generally implement mouse events in a somewhat ad-hoc way, which is understandable, but this one is pretty confusing to me: Internet Explorer on the WP7 platform appears to return a clientX and clientY for the mouseover event which is changed depending on the current scale of the page. (mousedown, mouseup, and mousemove are unaffected.)
On most platforms, when you first click on a div, you will get a ‘click’ and ‘mouseover’ event which are in the same location. Getting these events in the same location at the same time is one of the few ways that you can determine you are actually getting a ‘tap’ from a mobile browser, as opposed to a ‘click’ from a desktop browser.
Unfortunately, if you have a page which IE has scaled — which it does by default — the mouseover event is modified; when zoomed out (the default), it looks about half of the click location, whereas when zoomed all the way in, it can be exactly double the click location.
You can test this on this URL in the OpenLayers sandbox; note that the mouseover event is only set the *first* time you click on an element in IE as well, but that’s not an uncommon behavior.
Here’s hoping that someday the browser on WP7 is a bit less… ‘different’. Perhaps someday it will feel less like I’m working with… well, IE.