[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Matthew Thomas]

On 22 Aug, 2004, at 11:31 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
> I think UAs should automatically highlight the accesskey (or add it in
> brackets if it isn't already in the string). I am thinking of writing 
> some text -- optional, of course, since this wouldn't apply to all UAs 
> or all platforms -- that specifies this.

That sounds reasonable. It would help discourage authors from 
highlighting accesskeys in inconsistent ways, and from highlighting 
accesskeys even when serving to UAs that ignore the attribute. (Though 
as I said before, I'd prefer that the spec discourage UAs from paying 
attention to the attribute at all, and authors from using it, in lieu 
of actually removing it.)

> I also think that there should be an accesskey value which is basically
> "auto", and which picks a non-clashing access key based on the element
> content.
> ...

I don't think that would be a good idea. It could easily result in the 
same element unexpectedly having different access keys on different 
pages. It could even result in the same element having different access 
keys at different times on the *same* page, if other elements that 
needed the original access key more urgently (i.e. specified it 
explicitly, or had no other unused characters in their labels) were 
added to the page using the DOM or WF2's repetition model.

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/