Re: OnActivate Re: Scripting Techniques first draft

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Tom Wright wrote:
> 
> 
>>I don't think we should be promoting onactivate. It is part of the IE
>>Dom and poorly supported besides which onclick is device independent in
>>most browsers now (Bug 490 - 16.3 of HTML Techniques).
> 
> 
> It is also part of SVG [1] and an Activate event is defined in DOM 2 Events
> [2] as a UI event (which is therefore inherited by languages such as SMIL
> 2...)

But the draft clearly says "The techniques in this document are specific 
to Hypertext Markup Language content [HTML4], [XHTML1]" so it doesn't 
help for this draft that SVG has an onactivate event handler.
And even with DOM Level 2 Events having defined the DOMActivate event 
there is no introduction of an event handler attribute named onactivate 
into the HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 markup language, instead if you want to 
have an event listener listening for DOMActivate events in HTML 4.01 or 
XHTML 1.0 you need to use script to attach the event listener, markup as 
the draft in its example
   <a href="menu.php" onactivate="checkForCookie()">main menu</a>
suggests doesn't solve that.

Lastly I want to point out that IE 5.5/6 on Windows support an 
onactivate event handler attribute, see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/events/onactivate.asp
but despite the same name it has different behaviour than that suggested 
in the DOM Level 2 events for DOMActivate. With IE the event fires when 
the element is tabbed to/navigated to while the DOM spec wants it to be 
fired when a button or link already focussed receives an enter key.

Thus I think if the draft wants to suggest to use the DOMActivate event 
with HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 it has to point out that there is no markup to 
achieve that, instead scripting has to be used to attach an event listener.

-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 2004 14:55:43 UTC