Re: DOM3 Key events

* Oliver Hunt wrote:
>   Recently Doug Schepers contacted the Apple WebKit team for  
>feedback on the DOM3 key event model (http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM- 
>Level-3-Events/keyset.html), and after some discussion asked if i  
>could bring some of the details into a public thread.

Thanks for your comments. There are two things I would like to note.
First, the former DOM Working Group spend a good deal of effort on the
new events, their context information, and the key naming; we already
have implementations of them and other specifications require support
for parts of it. It's very late to make changes to them, and if there
are major issues, it might be best to split them completely into a new
specification.

>   * The behaviour and interaction (and existence) of a keypress  
>event is completely absent.  While the keypress events are (to a  
>greater or lesser extent) evil, they are used extensively on many  
>websites, and are supported by all major browsers, so not defining  
>behaviour will leave us trapped in the awful quagmire of  
>incompatibility that already exists.

Second, the Working Group agreed long ago to define a keypress event
(and possibly a "longkeypress" event and legacy context information
like .charCode and such), but not as part of the DOM Level 3 speci-
fication, but rather as separate document. That is primarily so be-
cause nobody has yet come up with specification text for them, which
in turn is largely because some things are not particularily inter-
operable about them. I believe Doug Schepers is the latest volunteer
to work on this.

>This behaviour is not something that should be used to standardise on  
>as it has been designed with the goal of website compatibility rather  
>than to be "nice".

There seem to be only three options: a) we do not standardize in the
area, b) we standardize whatever is implemented, c) browser vendors
change their browsers, probably sacrificing web site compatibility in
the process.

As for your other points, is there anything in the specification that
we absolutely must change, or that Apple would have to change in order
comply with the specification where Apple is unlikely to do so?
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Thursday, 2 August 2007 02:11:51 UTC