RE: ACCESSKEY attribute

At 11:43 AM 16/02/98 -0800, David Bolnick wrote:
>In IE the ACCESSKEY is assigned to the Alt so that is follows the
>Alt+menu-mnemonic convension (as in selecting a menu from the menu bar).

Is there any reason why ACCESSKEY does not work for me using IE 4.01 for
Win95 at <http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/>?

>Given that: If, for example, a 'Save' Button uses ACCESSKEY="s", then the
>button text should be _S_ave (i.e., Save with the initial S underlined:
><u>S</u>ave).

The browser should underline the character, not the author.  If the author
underlined it, users of non-supporting browsers and browsers with a
different method of selecting an ACCESSKEY would be somewhat confused.
Also keep in mind that the U element is deprecated in HTML 4.0.

A more explicit implementation, and one that would allow for an access key
not actually present in the label, would be for the browser to output
[ALT-S] (for ACCESSKEY=S) before or after the form control.  The
my-layout-or-no-layout crowd would probably throw a fit, but it might be
useful at least as a user option.  In general, though, I'd rather as a user
have the convention of my operating system used--for Windows, this would be
underlining, but other operating systems may have different customs.

--
Liam Quinn
Web Design Group            Enhanced Designs, Web Site Development
http://www.htmlhelp.com/    http://enhanced-designs.com/

Received on Monday, 16 February 1998 19:48:39 UTC