On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:02:26 +1100, Matthew Paul Thomas
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
Jerason Banes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2008-01-25 23:41 -0600:
...
Another long story short: accesskey mark is already in use in a
significant amount of existing content, so leaving it unspec'ed
for implementors does not seem like a practical option -- not if
we care about trying to ensure that behavior of that content is
consistent/ interoperable across UAs.
But that's precisely the problem: accesskey= *can't* be consistent and
interoperable across UAs, or even across browsers, because browsers
compete (amongst other things) on their user interfaces, and therefore
they have different user interfaces, and therefore they conflict with
different values of accesskey=. If that problem had a good solution,
removing the attribute would not have been necessary.
The problem does indeed have a god solution, which is to remove the stupid
suggestion about the activation behaviour (alt/cmd/etc) in the spec. iCab,
Opera, Amaya and Firefox have already implemented something intelligent
that lets you avoid conflicts.
The specification could include an explicit statement of the form "UAs
must ignore the accesskey= attribute", but any such statement would be
in the yet-to-be-written "Rendering" section.
And an unimaginatve and unintelligent approach anyway.
...
Most handsets don't have keyboards or real pointing devices that
let you quickly point and click on links; instead they just have
numeric keypads and "5-way" directional pads that are basically
the equivalent of arrow keys plus an enter key/mouse button.
In the context of delivering content to those devices, it's useful
to provide numbered access keys for quick access to certain links
on a page -- to save users the time and trouble of needing to use
the 5-way on the handset to scroll to the links and activate them.
...
Since most pages that contain links don't also use accesskey=, handset
vendors should find a way to allow easy navigation of links regardless
of whether the attribute is present.
They do. However, accesskey, which is to primarily designed to give an
increased navigation priority to certain links, is very useful for
handsets, and not actually very complicated to implement, in a way that is
consistent with the existing markup. It might not be the same across all
implementations, but there is very little restriction needed to make an
implementation compatible with almost any imaginable UI.
And all of this has been proposed before, implemented by people in various
ways in javascript or via proxy-based scripting as well as in user agents,
and is hardly rocket science.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jul/0213.html gives
you a set of implementation techniques, links to a set of minimal changes
required to the spec, etc. (There is more that could be done in an
advanced implementation, but it isn't really complicated).
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com
