- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 02:56:52 +1200
On 23 Aug, 2004, at 9:47 AM, Matthew Raymond wrote: > > Matthew Thomas wrote: >> >> On 22 Aug, 2004, at 1:21 PM, Matthew Raymond wrote: >>> >>> Ian Hickson wrote: > ... >>>> It has to be. Google is a user agent. You can't require that google >>>> render access keys, that makes no sense. :-) >>> >>> ??? Google is a user agent??? >> >> Yep. Its User-Agent: string is "Googlebot/2.1 >> (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)". > > I'm not sure this qualifies as a USER agent, "An HTML user agent is any device that interprets HTML documents. User agents include visual browsers (text-only and graphical), non-visual browsers (audio, Braille), search robots, proxies, etc." <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/conform.html#didx-user_agent> > and I'm not sure if rendering HTML as HTML is really rendering at all. > Aside from that, I doubt anyone needs access keys enabled from within > search result summaries. Which, I think, was exactly Ian's point. You can't require a particular rendering from a user agent (such as Googlebot) that doesn't render. And you shouldn't require a particular rendering in a context (such as search results) that is inappropriate. > ... >> With the factory settings of Windows 2000 and later, rendering >> accesskeys "in a way that is consistent with the native operating >> system or platform UI conventions" means hiding them until Alt is >> pressed, and in Mac OS X it usually means not rendering them at all. > ... > Personally, I think this is a mistake on the part of operating > system vendors. (FWIW, I used to think the same thing. <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25894#c4> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25894#c20>) > What's the point of access keys if no one knows what they are? "No-one" is an exaggeration; the point is to make them *difficult* to know, so as to maximize the productivity of the population as a whole. People who are unable to use a pointing device efficiently (e.g. disabled people, or people with very badly-designed or -configured pointing devices) will still put in the effort to learn them, but people who can use a pointing device efficiently will not be lured into regular use of a GUI activation mechanism which they think is faster but usually isn't. > This problem is only made worse by Ian's idea of automatically > resolving access key conflicts between the web page and the browser. > If the user can't see the auto-selected access key, how can they > possibly know what key to press? That's partly why I don't think that idea is a good one. Even if you memorized the access key for a particular control, it might change on the next page. > ... >> There might be cases where a prompt is not the worst possible >> solution to an interface design problem. But I don't think this is >> one of them. > > I've made other suggestions, like having an "access key mode", but > I've heard little regarding these suggestions, Invisible (or near-invisible) modes are bad firstly because people switch modes by accident (or start in the wrong mode) and don't realize until too late; and secondly because part of a person's short-term memory needs to be reserved for remembering which mode they're in, rather than used for working on the problem at hand. For a few people (e.g. vi users) the efficiency they get in return is worth it, but not for most people. > and no one seems to be coming up with any other ideas. I still like my idea of deprecating the thing. :-) -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Monday, 23 August 2004 07:56:52 UTC