RE: Find as you type for navigation

Jesper Tverskov wrote:
> In Firefox to find a letter in a link you press apostrophe 
> (') and slip it again and then a letter in the link. In Opera it is
comma 
> (,). In both browsers F3 will move focus to the next match.

In Firefox you can either select an option and it is always on, or press
forward slash to start the function, or cntl-f (the usual 'find'
key-combo) also does the same thing. Heh! Just tried it, and apostrophe
works to! (Didn't know that before :)

> The above is probably ok if we want to find something in a 
> link. But that is not what we want when we navigate a website 
> using this "Find" substitute for short cut keys.

I'm not sure what you mean by this? The firefox function finds any text,
not just links. There is a hidden option to restrict it to links, but
for the typical end user an extension would probably be needed.

> In order to use "Find as you type" for link navigation, in a 
> simple way that will work for most people, it should only 
> consider the first letter of the link text.

I disagree, the narrowing feature is very useful, often many links will
have the first same letter. It might be nice if there was an option to
default to finding the start of a link, but adding a space at the
beginning of your search has the same effect. (I.e. " x".)

> Also both Opera and Firefox have this "creeping featurism" 
> problem. It is ok to have a lot of extra options for advanced users
but the 
> basic features should work right away.

Hmm, I think they do, you haven't mentioned anything that doesn't work
as I would expect. I'm sure there are things, but I'm not sure where you
going with this?

> For links "Find as you type" should as default only consider 
> one character, and only the first one in the link text.

See above, and additionally: Who would benefit from that, and why? 
I'm not seeing the use-case.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

-- 
Alastair Campbell         |  Director of User Experience

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Received on Thursday, 27 July 2006 12:13:05 UTC