[whatwg] [web-forms] Add ACCESSKEY to SELECT
James Graham
jg307 at cam.ac.uk
Wed Aug 25 19:15:26 PDT 2004
Derek Featherstone wrote:
>Ian Hickson <mailto:ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>
>>(And eventually, we'll define what accesskey is supposed to
>>do, in WA1...)
>>
>>
>
>Any thoughts about deprecating accesskey and creating the access attribute,
>similar to that in the XHTML 2 drafts? It is much more flexible that way --
>or is it too much work for browsers to change the way they work to make it
>practical?
>
>
I don't see the value in the XHTML 2 proposition at all. If the choice
of accesskeys is entirely left to the user/ua, there is little value in
the proposed access attribute - I would expect a UA to allow any link or
focusable element on the page to be assigned a user-defined accesskey.
The only interesting feature it provides is the ability to assign a
single accesskey to multiple elements. However, if the user has to go to
the trouble of setting all the accesskeys manually, they could easilly
do this themselves. Therefore the only value of the attribute is to
provide reasonable author defined defaults for the elements that should
have accesskeys and the groups of elements that should have the same
accesskey. This can be done in an entirely backward compatible manner
simply by specifying that the accesskey attribute defines a default key
that may be changed by the UA (either by user preference or because of a
conflict with an existing keybinding). A DOM property could be provided
to obtain the actual accesskey assigned to an element.
This approach would have the two significant benefits over the XHTML2
approach; backward compatibility and the option of default accesskeys
for the (probably frequent) cases where the user doesn't wish to spend
time setting up the keyboard navigation. With the proviso that the UA is
not required to respect the author's choice of accesskeys or even
provide them at all, I think it's a much better solution.
In my opinion, the problems with accesskeys are entirely with the
implementations (although the HTML 4 spec may be a little limited in
scope). Having a good implementation of accesskeys doesn't add to
marketshare so little time is spent producing an innovative solution to
the problems. Since any spec is unlikely to make people switch browsers
based on the quality of their accesskey implementation, this situation
is unlikely to change with either XHTML 2 or Web Forms.
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