This utility emulates standard click and dblclick behavior for touch devices on typically non-clickable elements (e.g., an ordinary <div> element).

Unfortunately, touch browsers fire a broken click event which does not update the number of clicks making double click events much more difficult handle. As such, two new events are needed which gets consistently fired in both environments. These are implemented here as tap and dbltap.

These events are enabled for both mouse and touch devices by attaching a doubleTap handler:

// Enable tap & dbltap events
var myElem = document.getElementById('foo');
myElem.addEventListener(('ontouchend' in myElem) ? 'touchend' : 'mouseup', doubleTap(speed, distance), false);
myElem.addEventListener('tap', ontapHandler, false);
myElem.addEventListener('dbltap', ondbltapHandler, false);

A related but different common problem is isolating clicks and double (or higher) clicks.

The xorTap.js script adds a helper for creating a combined event handler that fires these events mutually exclusively. It can be attached to the standard click event or the tap event that is created by doubleTap.js.

Just pass in handlers for each of the different levels (can even handle triple clicks and higher):

// Create a combo event handler
var xorhandler = xorTap(
	function(e) {
		alert('click!');
	},
	function(e) {
		alert('double click!');
	});

// Attach as click event
var myElem = document.getElementById('foo');
myElem.addEventListener('click', xorhandler, false);

// Or combine with doubleTap to attach as tap event
var myElem = document.getElementById('bar');
myElem.addEventListener(('ontouchend' in myElem) ? 'touchend' : 'mouseup', doubleTap(speed, distance), false);
myElem.addEventListener('tap', xorhandler, false);

The example shows how these different pieces can work together to unify the experience for touch / mouse environments.

Mobile Safari on iOS (iPhone / iPad) has a default behavior of zooming when double tapping. To disable zooming, a meta tag must be put in the head of the HTML document:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,user-scalable=no" />

These scripts are free to use and are distributed under The MIT License.

Copyright (c)2012 Stephen M. McKamey.