[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Derek Featherstone wrote:
> On 28 Aug 2004, Ian Hickson <mailto:ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Say you're writing a game (www.voidwars.com, for instance).
> > You want a shortcut for "show minimap", a shortcut for "just to research
> > screen", a shortcut for "select next scout ship with no orders".
> > 
> > How would the access attribute help?
> 
> Actually, I think this would be a great case for where the access attribute
> would be very useful. With current implementation of accesskey, the author
> defines which access points are important (by adding an accesskey attribute)
> and defines which key should be used (by specifying the accesskey value).
> Neither the accesskey or the access points can be overridden.

Right, accesskey is a terrible solution for this problem.


> In most games that I've played, there is a default keystroke for a 
> specific action/behaviour, but you have the ability to override those 
> and set them to your preferred keystroke. The author might suggest that 
> "M" might be used for "Show Minimap", but the user could override that 
> to use "P" for "Show Minimap", if they wanted.
> 
> Continuing with your game example then, the access attribute (as seen in 
> XHTML 2.0), would let authors define the access points (show minimap, 
> research screen, select next scout ship, etc), as well as provide a list 
> of suggested keystrokes for those access points as well as allow them to 
> be overridden. I'd suggest they might provide some type of link 
> relationship pointing to a file that maps suggested keys to the access 
> points in the document|page|application. If the user overrides them, the 
> User Agent reads the local file rather than remote file specified in the 
> link relationship.

XHTML2's definition seems to stop some way short of your suggestion. For 
example, XHTML2 seems to suggest the list of access names will be fixed.

My main concerns with an idea like that one is that I don't see that UAs 
will want to implement a UI that lets users pick keys for access points. 
For instance I don't imagine Firefox adding such a UI.

Also, if the list of keys isn't fixed, you'll end up with a huge mess of 
access point names -- just look at your current list of cookies, and 
imagine that, for access point names.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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