Mnemonics in menu items are indispensable for actions you have to repeat many times. For example, Visa periodically opens a promotion where you can enter your credit card payments one by one. If you do it once a month, you usually have quite a few of them to enter. Using a mouse for the purpose is much slower, drearier and more strenuous. And it may happen as well that your employee has to fill such forms on a regular basis. I imagine keyboard mnemonics are especially important for people with disabilities. Their advantage over keyboard shortcuts is that you can read them incrementally (you can inform the user about a composite shortcut when he activates the menu item but the menu item usually disappears before she is able to read the hint). An extreme case of broken UI is displaying the shortcut in the status line down there when the focus is on the menu up there. Best regards Chris
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Fedoniouk Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 9:01 PM To: Ian Hickson Cc: WHAT WG List Subject: Re: [whatwg] Looking at menus in HTML5... Mnemonics in menu items is a very old concept. I doubt that people are using them for selecting menu items. They used to be actual for UI scripting/automation when sending of keystrokes was the only way to activate some function/command from the code. Do you know anybody who is using mnemonics for menu item activations these days? Especially in web apps that are primarily occasionally used and highly dynamic things - you literally cannot remember all keystroke sequences for particular functions in all sites you are visiting. In contrast rich menus with inline descriptions and proper organization will help you significantly more to get what you need in application that you use say at the end of the month to do your online banking or so. Andrew Fedoniouk. http://terrainformatica.com