Style Guide meeting summary

We slogged through some more grid issues today.

Because of the variety of things that could be in grid cells, Edit 
seemed overly specific, possibly applying only to text editing. Action 
and Actionable seemed more generalized. Updated on wiki page.

We talked about other ways to exit Actionable Mode. Most keys such as 
Enter might be already mapped such as in the case of a rich text editor 
in the cell. We didn't consider F2, in addition to Esc, to get out of 
Actionable mode. Added to agenda for next time.

We spent a good bit of time discussing the difficulty in implementing 
the tab and shift-tab when in Actionable mode. There is no easy 
attribute to scan for to locate which is the next actionable cell and 
bring it into view. Also, for large grids rows may be progressively 
fetched so scanning for additional actionable cells can be non-trivial. 
In the end, not having this feature means keyboard only users would have 
to hunt for the editable cells which would be burdensome, so we decided 
to keep this in the design even though the implementation might 
currently be hard.

We talked about how to see instructions of other non-Actionable 
information in adjacent cells when the user is currently actioning 
content in a cell. We decided that it is best that the user leave 
Actionable mode and navigate to the adjacent content and then come back. 
The primary concern was that many common key combinations used to 
inspect adjacent cells without leaving the current cell would probably 
conflict with widget behaviors in the current cell, or would be so 
convoluted as to inflict high cognitive loads or be undiscoverable.

We reviewed a snag in that the overriding of basic tab behavior means 
that a user has no good way to navigate to links within grid cells. The 
alternative, allowing the user to tab to links within the grid, could be 
problematic in that a grid listing hundreds of URLs would mire the user 
in a tabbing black hole. The lesser of the two evils was chosen. The 
user can inspect a grid cell that has links in it but the tab key will 
move focus off to the next widget when in Navigation mode. Is this 
sufficient?

Lastly we touched on the lack of grid cell selection keys. We added that 
as an issue for next week's call.

I dropped the Control Z and Control Y keys as they are part of the 
overall global widget recommendations for undo and redo respectively.

All changes now updated on

http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide

Let me know if I missed anything.

CB

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 2008 17:35:22 UTC