- From: Chris Blouch <cblouch@aol.com>
- Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:26:53 -0500
- To: Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@utoronto.ca>
- CC: "Evans, Donald" <Donald.Evans@corp.aol.com>, Earl Johnson <Earl.Johnson@Sun.COM>, wai-xtech@w3.org
This is a tough nut to crack. We are trying to make web apps behave like desktop apps and the precedent set forth by various OSes has been discord in some areas of navigation. So do we emulate the desktop to the point where web apps also vary from platform to platform or do we try to extract what a best practice is. Of course we go with a single best practice. That, unfortunately, means there will be winners and losers. For the losers there is the loss of potentially years of muscle memory from consistent object-action bindings. Obviously the choices will be hard and should not be driven by platform dominance, but we must either choose unity and consistency between browsers/platforms or it the same old dichotomy all over again. One of the alluring aspects of the web was platform or user-agent agnosticism. Some suffering by some users now for a consistent widget behavior for everyone later seems a worthy cost. The age old common good argument. CB Joseph Scheuhammer wrote: > >> >> As an example, many people already understand how to operate a treeview >> from the MS OS. Therefore it makes sense to mimic that keyboard >> behavior in the same type of widget on the web. > > Except...those people who use Macs. They are used to its treeview key > navigation, so it seem odd to them to switch gears to the web tree > widget. > > Which doesn't answer the question re: sticking to the platform's key > navigation vs. overriding. It just adds fuel to fire (to switch > metaphors). >
Received on Thursday, 28 February 2008 22:27:28 UTC