- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:19:37 +1200
On 19 Jul, 2004, at 9:49 AM, Matthew Raymond wrote: > > Matthew Thomas wrote: > ... >> The W3C is frequently wrong about UI details. Here, for example, >> firstly they failed to recognize that in native applications on any >> platform, clicking the label for a listbox (aka <select multiple>) or >> text field will not focus the field. > > Are you suggesting we change HTML spec behavior here? If so, can > you explain why this specific behavior is undesirable beyond the fact > that it's not a standard Mac behavior? Read what I said. I did not say the specced behavior was faulty just on the Mac platform. I said the specced behavior was wrong "on any platform". Therefore, given that the What-WG is interested in making Web applications more like native applications, it would be a good idea for the WG to correct this error in the spec. > ... > Web pages are a special GUI case where behavior needs to be as > consistent as possible across all platforms. That is incorrect. The principle of device independence "does not say that the user experience will be the same on every device" <http://www.w3.org/TR/di-princ/#DIP-1>. On the contrary, the WAI User Agent Accessibility Guidelines say that user agents should "[o]bserve operating environment conventions for the user agent user interface, documentation, input configurations, and installation" <http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/guidelines.html#gl-conventions>. For example, one of the browser vendors whose staff are contributing to this working group (Opera) specializes in producing browsers for mobile phones. It would be inappropriate for forms to behave exactly the same on mobile phones as they do on desktop computers, since the latter are likely to have much more convenient pointing devices. > Web authors need to know that the way their page behaves on their own > platform is going to be the the same on all other platforms. It's far too late for that. For example, since the beginning of the Web, almost all graphical browsers have allowed people to turn off images. As another example, Internet Explorer and Netscape 4 do not add the value of any particular submit button to a GET URI if the Enter key is pressed, but Opera and Gecko browsers arbitrarily choose the first submit button in the form. > If you start changing the rules for each platform, it only encourages > webmasters to target specific platforms like Windows. (BTW, although > I'd love to have a Mac, I am not in possession of one, so can someone > let me know if any Mac OS X browsers don't follow HTML spec behavior > for label focus.) One of the browser vendors whose staff are contributing to this working group (Apple) produces a browser (Safari) that, in its latest release version, does support <label> at all. > ... > Besides, this kind of workaround is pretty silly just to avoid > focus on controls when a label is clicked. That's why I said: "having to do that to work around a bug in the spec would be pretty annoying". > Was there some other behavior you wanted to happen when they click the > label? > ... Yes: nothing at all. Users frequently click on (what they assume to be) non-functional parts of a GUI or a Web page as a form of doodling, while they're reading or thinking of what to write. Such clicks unexpectedly changing focus could produce undesirable results. For example, clicking on the label for a single-line text field (which would be non-functional if it was a native app) shortly before typing Enter would accidentally submit the form. -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Sunday, 18 July 2004 16:19:37 UTC