Re: Key Events internationalization

* Richard Ishida wrote:
>Please let me know whether I'm on the right track above - especially wrt a
>single keyIdentifier being produced per physical key.

I think you are largely correct.

>I assume that one goal of using key identifiers is to have a standard way of
>referring to the press/release of a given key across user agents.  I don't
>however see any suggestions for how to choose one among the set of
>characters potentially produced by a key.  The guidelines for defining key
>identifiers seems to indicate that "U+0051" (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q) is a
>good choice for the physical key engraved with Q on a US PC/AT keyboard.
>U+0051 is the character generated by that key with the shift key pressed on
>such a keyboard. But for a key engraved with 1/! the document suggests
>"U+0031" (DIGIT ONE) - this being the unshifted result of that key.  

There are guidelines in A.1.5; for the key identifiers listed in the
appendix, the draft notes in the introduction that these were largely
taken from the keyboard event facilities in Microsoft's .NET Frame-
work and Java. If I remember correctly, both use 0x51 as integer re-
presentation of the q/Q key and at least the former 0x31 for the 1/!
key, I suspect this is the main reason for the mapping.

>Is there an implicit convention that where no-shift and shift produce
>respectively lower and upper case characters in typing from the same key, an
>implementation should produce a key identifier associated with the upper
>case letter, whereas if there is no upper vs lower case correspondance the
>implementation should produce a key identifier that is associated with the
>unshifted result when typing text for a given keyboard mapping? (And does
>this convention related to uppercase extend to Cyrillic, Armenian and Greek
>keyboards?)

There are no guidelines beyond those in the draft and I am not aware
of established conventions implementers could follow, should the need
arise to define new key identifiers. Note that right now it is not
expected that browsers will offer appropriate key identifiers for all
keys; on my german keyboard, pressing the ö/Ö key might well result
in the browser reporting the .keyIdentifier as "Unidentified".
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Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2007 19:31:33 UTC