[Bug 13958] Authors should be able to request specific modifiers for accesskeys

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13958

--- Comment #9 from Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> 2012-09-15 12:17:07 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #6)
> This is already on the medium-term plan for accesskey. I intend to add
> "modifier+" prefixes to what is currently just single-letter items, as well as
> key names ("home", "F1", etc; see bug 13576). That's why the spec currently
> says to ignore values longer than one character. First I'm waiting for
> implementations to pick up the stuff we've specced so far.
> 
> One open question is what to do about the way that different platforms use
> different accelerators for different purposes. e.g. Windows uses Ctrl where Mac
> uses Command; Mac and Unix have accelerators like Ctrl+A for going to the start
> of the line, and each platform has their own eccentricities, e.g. Mac's "Home"
> key doesn't act like Windows' "Home" key; "Shift-Delete" on Windows is quite
> different than on Mac, etc. I don't really want to have to list a bazillion
> "virtual" keys for these purposes.
> 
> Any suggestions welcome. For now I'm marking this LATER; please don't hesitate
> to reopen this if you notice before I do that browsers have adopted what we
> have here so far (accesskey="a b c", accessKeyLabel, etc).

Suggestion: Please don't add modifiers as a way to give authors more control.
(Adding key names is fine - and as we appear likely to get more voice commands
in the web being able to add words is going to help attach commands directly to
the interface of a page instead of relying solely on the browser).

Accesskeys have a fighting chance of being useful precisely to the extent that
authors *don't* control them, and accept that the user agent won't allow that.
They were fine for a decade on mobile phones that had keypads even while they
were unusable on a number of desktop browsers that gave authors the ability to
interfere with the browser's user interface.

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Received on Saturday, 15 September 2012 12:17:09 UTC