Re: Thoughts on ACCESSKEY

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, E. Stephen Mack wrote:

> I'm interested in speculation as to how different
> user agents should implement ACCESSKEY, especially
> in regards to anchors.  IE 4.0 platform preview already
> has partial support, so I'll discuss the specification,
> how IE has implemented ACCESSKEY, and some questions.

[...]

IMHO, ACCESSKEY attribute seems to be somewhat media-dependant (UAs are not
required to have "keyboards"). Anyway, if I had a menu of links, like the
one on the <http://www.w3.org/>:

   HTML
   Style Sheets
   Document Object Model
   Math
   Graphics and 3D
   Internationalization
   Fonts
   Amaya
   Arena

does the author have to arbitrarily assign access keys to the links? (And
why should he/she care? Some UAs allow you to "select" a link using TAB
key.)

> What's the best way for authors to show which access key
> they've assigned?
>
> <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com" ACCESSKEY="Z">Z: Yahoo!</A>
> <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com" ACCESSKEY="Z">Yahoo! (Z)</A>
> <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com" ACCESSKEY="Z">Yahoo! [Access=Z]</A>

This should be up to the UA, not "hardcoded" into the anchor content. When
printing an HTML document, it is useless to show the access key.

--
Steve Cheng
elmert@ipoline.com
http://www.ipoline.com/~elmert/

Received on Friday, 18 July 1997 15:08:39 UTC