Re: Accesskey - spec proposal

On Jul 3, 2007, at 4:08 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:30:20 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak  
> <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> It also seems that accesskey would not work very well on mobile  
>> devices, which often have limited keyboards.
>
> The WAP forum (now OMA) obviously disagreed with you, since on WAP  
> browsers accesskey (although restricted to numbers 1-9) is widely  
> interoperable.

1) That's obviously not interoperable with the use of accesskey in  
general web content (as opposed to waled garden "mobile web"  
content), since the few real sites that use accesskey do not restrict  
themselves to 1-9. Although if they did, it might be easier to  
reserve keybindings for them...

2) How does this work on phones that have a full alphabetic keyboard,  
but where you have to hold down a special numeric modifier to type  
numbers in any context but the dialer? (For instance, my Nokia e61).  
And does an unmodified 1-9 still act as a rapid access key when  
typing into a text field on such a phone?

3) How does work on phones that are all touchscreen and don't even  
show an onscreen keyboard most of the time?

High-end phones are usually in categories 2 and 3, so it sounds like  
the types of phones capable of rendering real web content well  
haven't been considered in this design.

>
>> And screen real estate is too precious to add a menu just for this  
>> relatively obscure feature.
>
> When browsing a large amount of content on a small screen, rapid  
> navigation to a point of interest is in fact something people seem  
> to appreciate. While on a large mobile device you can afford to do  
> it like Opera mini 4, nokia, and apple with an overview first, on a  
> smaller screen such as many feature phones today that is less  
> advantageous. The WML markup (developed on monochrome screens  
> effectively much smaller than we have now) did indeed use screen  
> real estate for this, since there is in fact a lot of benefit.

WML is not the web. Has anyone done this on a mobile device for HTML?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 17:30:52 UTC