onclick behaviour also triggered by keyboard ?

A nice Friday afternoon (at least where I am) question for the list:

although the HTML4.1 specification states that onclick "occurs when
the pointing device button is clicked over an element" (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/scripts.html#h-18.2.3 ), in my -
admittedly limited - testing I have found that it's also triggered by
keyboard in the usual way in most (if not all) browsers (i.e. if it's
applied to a link, tabbing to said link and hitting return/enter will
trigger the onclick event - provided js is enabled, of course).

So, my question would be: as there's contention as to what the 
device-independent handler equivalent to onclick is (as onkeypress just
seems to be too generic in that it will be triggered by any key...and
also would seem like complementing a device-specific handler with yet
another device-specific one...what about things like voice activation
in this context ?)...what's the deal ?

Is onclick simply a misnomer, and it should be handled as if it was 
something like "onactivation" (as in practice it seems to work in a 
device-independent manner) ? (this last point seems to be what Shadi
http://www.w3.org/People/all#shadi was mentioning at the recent
workshop in Madrid)

Thoughts and comments highly appreciated,

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Friday, 12 March 2004 12:02:48 UTC