It doesn’t make perfect sense, though, and (possibly because of that) doesn’t quite act as it now.
With a mouse, the 3 actions
- hover
- click
- double click
form a sequence where each action is an extension of the previous one.
Ideally, the actions triggered by them are extensions of the previous one, too. With the mouse, we have that:
- hover = tell me more, but don’t really do anything
- click = tell me more and select this item
- double click = look, select, and open this item
A big advantage of that is that it allows the interface to be faster. A GUI can react to a click by selecting an item without having to wait whether it will be part of a double-click, for example.
⇒ if we can’t get a real hover, in an ideal world, a softer or shorter finger tap, not a long one would mean “tell me about this”. I doubt we can shoe-horn that into the UI this late in the game, though.
