title: iPad Safari's mapping of mouse events to touch events in image-maps
body: <p>My website makes extensive use of image-maps. The images are of pages from a medieval manuscript. The mouseOver event of the AREA tags has a tooltip attached to it, which displays a modern typographic transcription of the ancient script for the line the mouse is hovering over. </p>
  
  <p>I just checked my website out on the iPad at the Apple store. The iPad is in many respects a joy to use, however, I am wondering about Apple's mapping of the mouse-events to the finger-touch events. Apple probably had a good reason for doing things as they did, but their choices seem counterintuitive and overly complicated to me. </p>
  
  <p>Specifically, the iPad Safari browser clearly was responding to both fingerDown and fingerTap, and in different ways. When I tapped an area of the image-map, the tooltip wired to the mouse-over event of the AREA tag was displayed, and remained visible until I tapped somewhere else. When I held my finger down on an area of the image-map, the area changed color. So if iPad Safari detects a mouseOver eventhandler, it executes the mouseOver code on the click|tap and apparently prevents the "click" event from propagating, so that if you also have something wired to the click event, it doesn't work? Is that right?</p>
  
  <p>But more importantly, why isn't fingerDown the iPad-Safari counterpart for mouseOver? FingerDown seems a more likely candidate than Tap when mapping the mouseOver event. I would have expected things to be mapped in this way:</p>
  
  <pre><code> MouseClick : FingerTap (i.e. finger down and then immediately up)
   MouseOver : FingerDown (finger down and stays on the spot)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If Apple had treated fingerDown as the counterpart to mouseOver, then the tooltip could be displayed upon FingerDown and made invisible again on fingerUp, which would be the counterpart to mouseOut.</p>
  
  <p>Perhaps someone could enlighten me about the thinking process that led Apple to these particular mouse-to-touch event-mappings?
  Thanks</p>