DOMActivate vs. Click

As I understand it, the purpose of DOMActivate is to remove the device dependence of an element's associated behavior. So, clicking on a hyperlink causes a click event whose default action is to fire DOMActivate. The default action of the DOMActivate would then be to navigate to the page. Calling preventDefault() on either would prevent the navigation from occurring.

I understand that associated activation behaviors can be invoked via different device interactions (using the keyboard while the link is focused). But if DOMActivate is supposed to remove the device dependence, why does the spec say: "when a user activates a hyperlink using a keyboard, the click event would be dispatched as default action<http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html#glossary-dt-default-action> of the respective keyboard event."

Shouldn't it be that activating the hyperlink with the keyboard causes a DOMActivate event which is dispatched as the default action of the respective keyboard event? Otherwise, why have the DOMActivate event if the activation behavior is going to have some "default" event associated with it which all other device interactions are supposed to synthesize.

It seems to me that firing a click event as the default action of an interaction via a device other than a mouse is not intuitive (especially since it is a MouseEvent and will have a number of associated attributes which are nonsensical).

--Jacob

Related thread: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2002AprJun/0036.html