Re: specification of "legacy" key events

On Apr 26, 2008, at 6:06 PM, Hallvord R. M. Steen wrote:

> All keys except dead keys fire the hardware reference events. What  
> other events are fired depends on the type of key that is pressed  
> and response from the event listeners. Typically, alphanumerical  
> keys and punctuation keys fire text insertion events while control  
> keys and navigation keys do not. Dead keys may fire text insertion  
> events if pressed twice or followed by a space. The first time a  
> dead key is pressed fires no events at all.


This is strange, in Internet Explorer and Safari (haven't tested other  
browsers), I'm observing a different behavior: pressing a dead key  
does fire keydown/keyup. I was testing with a German keyboard layout,  
pressing a key to the left from "1" (dead key for "^").

I also don't see any reason to avoid having the events fired.

> However, different keyboard layouts change what OEM reference a  
> certain key has!

Ugh! Yes, I agree that this is probably too chaotic to specify or  
emulate.

> When a key is pressed,	and the keydown event has been processed an  
> implementation must behave as if it implemented this algorithm when  
> firing keypress events:
>
> 	* If the keypress follows a keydown event on the same key and the  
> earlier keydown event had its default action cancelled, terminate  
> this algorithm.  [NOTE#1]

I think that this is a logical loop - since there is no keypress event  
in existence yet, it cannot follow a keydown, or be otherwise referred  
to :).

In my mental model, a keypress is a product of keydown default  
handling, and not something directly caused by a physical keystroke.  
It has been mentioned before that default handlers are out of scope  
for DOM Events; not sure how to resolve this. Possibly, the event  
could be specified by itself "in vacuum", and an informal note could  
describe when it actually gets fired?

> TODO: dead keys pressed twice fire two keypress events. Dead keys  
> followed by space fire keydown space, keypress for the dead key's  
> accent


Similarly, this is not necessarily something that the spec should  
formally define - although dead key handling is very similar between  
Mac and Windows (and presumably elsewhere), such details may not  
remain unchanged forever. It's just that the OS-specific default  
handler decides to fire two keypress events in some circumstances, etc.

- WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov

Received on Monday, 28 April 2008 09:37:39 UTC