[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Derek Featherstone wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 10, 2004 10:13 AM, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> 
>> [...] What accesskey= does, however, is to place the
>> responsibility of creating shortcuts on the author -- *the only
>> party* involved who can't possibly know enough to do a decent
>> job of it.
> 
> That's exactly what I've been saying all along, though nobody ever seems to
> agree with me. The concept of keystroke access is what needs to be
> preserved.

+1

> I still like the XHTML 2 proposal of the access attribute:
> 
> For single page:
> 1. Authors define key access points for items in their documents (their
> search form, individual form fields, other forms, whatever)

The key words here are "access point".

> For all pages/sites
> 1. Authors define key access points across *all* sites should be defined
> that mimic or bind to <link rel="" /> elements and their defined values -
> both currently existing and expanded: home, search, help, up, next, prev,
> privacy, accessibility, copyright, etc...

This is exactly what I've been thinking. I don't think that 'rel' is 
the best choice to bind with but it's a good start. If the new 
attribute is called 'access' one could write
<input type="text" access="person-first-name">
and UA could provide 'person-first-name' in the list of possible 
actions. The user could then bind a key to that action if he so 
decides. An UA running on MS Windows could even add another menu 
"_A_ccess" and populate it with all access points. The idea behind 
allowing special 'access' attribute is to allow authors to specify 
objects to mean the same thing even though the actual implementation 
differs -- one web site could bind 'search' access point to a link 
going to search page and another could bind the same access point to 
text entry box.

> 2. Authors provide a suggested list of keystrokes for those access points

I don't think that author could provide any meaningful suggestions. 
All the standard access keys should already have key binding and for 
the couple of remaining access points there's no way for page author 
to correctly guess even a one free key. Plus limiting access points 
to keys would prevent me from using mouse gestures to activate 
access points, for example.

-- 
Mikko