Re: Style Guide meeting summary

Hi;;

As Chris pointed out near the end of  his writeup below, selection is next
week's discussion - specifically the issue of contiguous and discontinuous
selection in navigation and actionable modes. As a primer for discussion:
1. Selection in Navigation mode could work the way it works in a, for
example, directory widget. Arrow keys react the same...
      a. Selection in Mail tool type grids, if they don't better fall in
Landmark grid navigation, throw a monkey wrench in this thought

2. Either type of selection in Actionable mode is a mess. Perhaps either
selection type in Actionable mode should only work within the grid cell
versus across grid cell boundaries?

Earl


On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Chris Blouch <cblouch@aol.com> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
Earl
http://www.linkedin.com/in/earljohnson1
408-417-9899