[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2
Matthew Raymond
mattraymond at earthlink.net
Wed Nov 17 10:45:38 PST 2004
James Graham wrote:
> Surely accesskey is better; since the author knows what the key
> combination is in advance they can specify it in the game screen. With
> access one either has the browser randomly assigning key shortcuts,
> hence making the keys hard to discover or the user defining their own
> shortcuts, with no defaults, which is complex and so unlikely to be
> undertaken by many users.
Well, on top of that, user agent vendors already have the tools to
implement the assignment of keys to controls. A browser knows what a
control is, otherwise it wouldn't render them. Controls commonly have
|id| attributes, |name| attributes and associated <label> elements which
could be used for intelligent shortcut assignment.
Personally, I'm beginning to see the utility in using <link> to
assign shortcuts, as suggested by Derek Featherstone:
http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeyalternatives/52
However, I see two problems with this.
First of all, if there is no conflict with the browser shortcuts or
existing user-defined shortcuts, then the |accesskey| value should be
used for the shortcut, even if another shortcut has been assigned to a
particular |rel| value by the user.
Secondly, not all <link> elements, or controls associated with them,
should have shortcuts. For instance, the web page may have several
<link> elements that establish relationships using the key work
"Similar", which would refer to similar articles. Would you necessarily
want to associate a shortcut with such content?
Furthermore, you'd have to bind these shortcuts to the link type
rather than a |title| attribute in order to ensure the shortcut works on
multiple sites. (For that matter, a typo for a |title| on a page within
a site may cause the shortcut not to work on that specific page.)
Any thoughts on this?
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