- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 03:15:26 +0100
Derek Featherstone wrote: >Ian Hickson <mailto:ian at hixie.ch> wrote: > > >>(And eventually, we'll define what accesskey is supposed to >>do, in WA1...) >> >> > >Any thoughts about deprecating accesskey and creating the access attribute, >similar to that in the XHTML 2 drafts? It is much more flexible that way -- >or is it too much work for browsers to change the way they work to make it >practical? > > I don't see the value in the XHTML 2 proposition at all. If the choice of accesskeys is entirely left to the user/ua, there is little value in the proposed access attribute - I would expect a UA to allow any link or focusable element on the page to be assigned a user-defined accesskey. The only interesting feature it provides is the ability to assign a single accesskey to multiple elements. However, if the user has to go to the trouble of setting all the accesskeys manually, they could easilly do this themselves. Therefore the only value of the attribute is to provide reasonable author defined defaults for the elements that should have accesskeys and the groups of elements that should have the same accesskey. This can be done in an entirely backward compatible manner simply by specifying that the accesskey attribute defines a default key that may be changed by the UA (either by user preference or because of a conflict with an existing keybinding). A DOM property could be provided to obtain the actual accesskey assigned to an element. This approach would have the two significant benefits over the XHTML2 approach; backward compatibility and the option of default accesskeys for the (probably frequent) cases where the user doesn't wish to spend time setting up the keyboard navigation. With the proviso that the UA is not required to respect the author's choice of accesskeys or even provide them at all, I think it's a much better solution. In my opinion, the problems with accesskeys are entirely with the implementations (although the HTML 4 spec may be a little limited in scope). Having a good implementation of accesskeys doesn't add to marketshare so little time is spent producing an innovative solution to the problems. Since any spec is unlikely to make people switch browsers based on the quality of their accesskey implementation, this situation is unlikely to change with either XHTML 2 or Web Forms. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20040826/48834b2d/attachment.htm>
Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 19:15:26 UTC