- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 13:45:38 -0500
James Graham wrote: > Surely accesskey is better; since the author knows what the key > combination is in advance they can specify it in the game screen. With > access one either has the browser randomly assigning key shortcuts, > hence making the keys hard to discover or the user defining their own > shortcuts, with no defaults, which is complex and so unlikely to be > undertaken by many users. Well, on top of that, user agent vendors already have the tools to implement the assignment of keys to controls. A browser knows what a control is, otherwise it wouldn't render them. Controls commonly have |id| attributes, |name| attributes and associated <label> elements which could be used for intelligent shortcut assignment. Personally, I'm beginning to see the utility in using <link> to assign shortcuts, as suggested by Derek Featherstone: http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeyalternatives/52 However, I see two problems with this. First of all, if there is no conflict with the browser shortcuts or existing user-defined shortcuts, then the |accesskey| value should be used for the shortcut, even if another shortcut has been assigned to a particular |rel| value by the user. Secondly, not all <link> elements, or controls associated with them, should have shortcuts. For instance, the web page may have several <link> elements that establish relationships using the key work "Similar", which would refer to similar articles. Would you necessarily want to associate a shortcut with such content? Furthermore, you'd have to bind these shortcuts to the link type rather than a |title| attribute in order to ensure the shortcut works on multiple sites. (For that matter, a typo for a |title| on a page within a site may cause the shortcut not to work on that specific page.) Any thoughts on this?
Received on Wednesday, 17 November 2004 10:45:38 UTC