- From: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 15:13:49 +0200
- To: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- cc: hbingham@ACM.org (Harvey Bingham), w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
> Good questions. Here are some related thoughts. More data, more souvenirs... Back when I was working on implementing the X Window and Motif toolkit, we had defined a level of event notification that would allow application to transparently support keyboard or mouse control in all widgets (i.e. UI WIndow obJECTS). If you take any good Motif programming book, you'll find definitions for things like osfCopy osfCut osfPaste osfClear osfEscape osfPageUp osfPageDown osfPageRight osfActivate osfMenuBar osfEndLine osfBeginLine osfSelect osfUndo osfCancel osfHelp osfSelectAll osfDeselectAll etc All these "virtual keysym", in our jargon, were meant to provide a layer of abstraction that permitted programs to stay independent of the device. In order to really be independent, the program "callbacks" had to follow some discipline and not dig into the guts of the real event that was behind this virtual notification. In retrospect, I think we should have made it impossible for the program API to access the real event details. Anyway, as Web pages involving DTHML are more and more ressembling the imperative coding practices of the past (vs. the declarative UI practives HTML FORM had introduced), this technology is likely to find a new use.
Received on Thursday, 15 October 1998 09:14:06 UTC