Re: agreement: user disposes; disagreement: author proposes [was: Re: When actions speak louder than words]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:59:21 +0100, Al Gilman <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org>  
wrote:

> There is a big leap from saying that the consumer *can* configure
> shortcuts to bind them to keystrokes, and saying that the consumer
> *will.*  It is quite possible that many more consumers will have the
> benefit of the short-cuts if they have an initial key binding "out of
> the box" as the web application pages open in the user's browser, and
> do not wait for the user to configure keys for the shortcut-prone
> functions specific to this application.

I entirely agree that being able to override whatever the author thought  
was a good shortcut is critical. We make browsers for devices with no  
keyboard but access to any set of shortcuts imaginable through voice,  
10-key keyboards, hindi and pujabi keyboards, numeric keyboards, and many  
others. There is nothing that is common across the entire range, so  
shortcuts *must* be adapted, and therefore must be adaptable.

I also agree that where there is information describing the functionality  
(such as the rel attribute in HTML) of a link that is better than an  
author-suggested shortcut. We wrote an opera extension designed to also  
work in Firefox to make that easier, by allowing the browser to pick up on  
rel attributes on a elements as well as link elements for just this reason  
- it means the user knows the browser shortcut for a pages search  
function, or next page function, rather than guessing what the author  
would have suggested.

Having said that, there is still value in the author making a suggestion  
of a key. Where we have no role information available, or have already  
assigned a primary key for a function (e.g. search the website, and there  
is also "search the 'subsite'") then having an author suggestion does no  
harm and gives us a hint about how to make something that is at least  
internally consistent. We would expect power browser users to configure  
something that suits them, and power site users to learn the model  
proposed by the site author, perhaps even configuring their activation  
methods in the browser to match the default suggestions of their favourite  
site.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                     chaals@opera.com
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
      Peek into the kitchen: http://snapshot.opera.com/

Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2005 16:25:44 UTC