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Mobile touch

LAW — locked, CI-gated

Status: law — the touch chapter is normative in docs/chapters/touch.md (ratified v1). Touch is a first-class chapter, not a port of the mouse face: a surface too small to poke is a broken surface, however elegant it is under a cursor.

carries unchanged. the token core (one core, never forked per device); the accent law; furniture; verbs get words, with labels defaulting on here; the states taxonomy; the performance law; the lowercase voice.

what adapts (law).

  • targets: 44px minimum, everywhere, no exceptions for prettiness.
  • density auto-switches on coarse pointers; the manual override remains a backup, never the mechanism.
  • labels default on: the labelled layer inverts to primary, because hover does not exist to carry meaning.
  • hover hints follow selection: the surface’s hint slot shows the selected object’s hint for as long as it stays selected.
  • every verb translates: tap selects and reveals the object’s controls on the selected object only; pinch is the spatial continuous value; rotate is a two-finger twist or a fat edge band; double-tap is the primary verb; long-press opens the menu, where verbs carry words.
  • haptics carry state here, under the haptics chapter’s restraint: a small closed vocabulary, never the sole signal for anything.

what is forbidden (law). hover-dependent meaning of any kind; gesture-only paths (every gesture verb also exists labelled); shrinking the desktop face and calling it touch support; hold gestures that commit anything destructive — hold opens.

named gaps in this chapter. the gesture vocabulary is still a candidate (its touch half has one product witness, not two); pen and stylus specifics are undefined; phone-size layout anatomy (below tablet width) does not exist yet — the principles above hold, the worked anatomy is unwritten.


Canonical chapter: docs/chapters/touch.md; map and spine in §13 of the design language document.