Re: Query on event-handlers

Stuart Auton wrote:

> I'm a new(ish) web designer trying to get to grips with web
> interoperability. As a learning exercise, I want my own website to
> achieve Conformance Level Triple-A.

Not to sound pessimistic, but: be aware that AAA is not as easy to 
achieve as some people think. AA yes, to a certain extent. But some of 
the priority 3 guidelines are not straightforward. I'd shy away from 
ever claiming AAA, as some P3 points are highly subjective (see for 
instance 14.2)

Anyway, rant over.

> This provides what I feel is a helpful comment in the status bar rather
> than the directory path to the file.

However, the directory path is the browser's expected behaviour, and 
you're effectively overriding how the browser works.

Also: why do you need helpful comments in the status bar of all places? 
Screenreaders would not pick up any change that you made to the status 
bar. Your link text should be helpful enough without resorting to this 
gimmick (which I thought had gone out of fashion sometime in the late 90s).

> As an aside, I've noticed that the onfocus/onblur combination appears to
> work in IE6 but not in Firefox whereas the onmouseover/onmouseout
> combination works in both.

Strange, I've not had any trouble with FF like that. Onfocus/onblur are 
fired as they should. Related to the previous part of this answer, I 
seem to recall that FF has disabled the ability of javascript to update 
part of the GUI like the status bar by default. That is more likely the 
cause of your problem.

Moral of the story: don't update the status bar text. It's something 
that was quite popular more than a decade ago. Your link text itself 
should be explicity enough without having to resort to "helpful" text in 
a completely separate part of the browser. None of the users I work with 
on a daily basis ever actually noticed the status bar...it's not 
something normal users look at.

-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
__________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
__________________________________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
__________________________________________________________

Received on Tuesday, 12 July 2005 12:35:06 UTC