@accesskey and multiple characters

Hi,
when Ian added the @accesskey definitions to the spec (as currently  
defined in [1] ), he said in an E-mail [2]:


> For future extensibility, I have also required tokens with more than one 
> character to be ignored for now. We can later add identifiers for various 
> purposes, e.g. accesskey="help" to mean that the user agent's default 
> "help" key should be used, whatever that is.

This unfortunately rules out using @accesskey as a replacement for certain  
things sites are already doing with JS - the example I have in mind is  
GMail's "gi" shortcut for going back to the inbox. I don't know if this is  
more important than the potential future extensibility. I'd lean towards  
allowing multi-character shortcuts since they are already used and using a  
<command>+@accesskey construct could make GMail more accessible to AT UAs..


[1]  
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html#the-accesskey-attribute
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009May/0027.html

-- 
Hallvord R. M. Steen, Core Tester, Opera Software
http://www.opera.com http://my.opera.com/hallvors/

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 10:03:03 UTC