Re: Underline element.

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> Apart from menu items (where it would read something like "Close 
> Ctrl+W"), I don't think the modifier key is usually shown in 
> applications (e.g. the actual "File" menu title, which sports an 
> underline under the F without needing to clarify what the modifier 
> is). This assumes that the particular application/page/document/etc 
> follows platform conventions (e.g. on Windows ALT is the modifier key 
> for menu item shortcuts, in all apps, so there's no need to specify 
> that ALT needs to be used to activate a menu shortcut in the first 
> place).

Yeah, interesting point; I didn’t consider that.

Note, though, that access key shortcuts are not the same as UI 
shortcuts. I don’t know, for example, that you can say that there’s a 
Windows convention for access key modifiers (unless Windows Internet 
Explorer is the convention, but even then, I believe that similar 
Windows applications such as Mozilla Firefox deviate here). You could 
expect the user to already know the modifier(s), I suppose, but users 
tend to be unreliable.

> As for the non-existent/already assigned case, that's one of the 
> reasons why I'd tend to think that it should be up to the UA itself to 
> give visual clues as to what accesskey assignment is currently in 
> place. On UAs that don't support it, for some reason, the misleading 
> visual clue simply won't be there, avoiding confusion. 

Yeah, this was part of the point I was trying to make with my second 
paragraph; I just didn’t get to it for whatever reason. (To rehash, the 
point was that this should be the UA’s job, not the author’s, since the 
former can provide more reliable information.)

I’m not sure how a UA would get away with automatically adding shortcut 
information inline with the document though. Maybe HTML 5 could provide 
some marker that authors could use that would be then be replaced by the 
UA with the actual shortcut at user option. Example:

<button id="open" accesskey="O">Open <keys for="open" start="(" 
end=")"/></button> would result in, for example: Open (Alt+Shift+O)

But I suppose I’m getting a bit off topic here, heh.

Received on Saturday, 29 December 2007 12:24:35 UTC