timeless ha scritto:
i don't really want to spend a lot of time with this, but any feature
authors are provided will be abused.
among my list of things which i wish were never let out of pandora's
box are defining accesskeys (instead of commands) in html, and another
which i'd hope dies on the vine is aural css.
sure it is theoretically nice to let someone encode audio. however on
average it's going to be used more often by advertisers than actual
content developers.
Of course, advertisers could avail of aural CSS, but they can right now
embed a voice registration into a flash ad, targeting a wider audience...
the amount of effort required to invest in a feature which is
generally not useful far exceeds any value offered to the user by the
agent.
in the case of accesskeys, a much more useful research area is to
developer a browser global way of accessing content which works well
for the device/useragent/user. enabling each site to design its own
poor access keys is much less useful than letting browsers be
configured by their users or share keybindings from one browser to
another for a given site.
Accesskeys are an attempt to reproduce offline applications' shortcuts
in web pages; maybe they're not the best, since they suffer for a double
dependence, from the browser settings and the underlying operating
system settings. So, if you even could make modifiers consistent from
one browser to another on the same platform, you couldn't easily do the
same cross-platform. Yet the overall mechanism might be improved. One
way to achieve this could be using key events, to create a more
articulate environment, and (anyway) establishing a generic reference to
a browser default modifiers (the ones provided for accesskeys) could be
usefull for cross-browser, cross-platform consistence (perhaps even for
your purposes).
For the rest, do you want to develope a browser (or a browser to be
developed) with the option to bypass default accesskeys at the user
will? That's possible, even without a direct support by the html: just
add this option and make it working like any other browser
customization, then store somewhere the users' choices on a somewhat
profile. Do you want generic commands, like mouse-keys combinations, or
mouse gestures too? That's the same, all to do is intercepting the
command before the document and translate it into an activation of the
desired control (i.e., by generating the activation behavior as defined
in section 3.4.1.7 Interactive content). Do you wish to exchange the
profile between browsers? Well, perhaps you're asking for a common
profile format and a shared local storage among browsers... uhm, no,
that would fail cross-platform (i.e. using a different OS or a different
computer), so another solution should be found... perhaps storing users'
webapps profiles in a remote server could solve such, and new services
could start around such possibility, but perhaps that could lead to some
security concerns, and perhaps, at the moment, it could be better to
leave to each site developers the choice of default keybindings and the
implementation of a mechanism to let the user customize the site/the
webapp, storing the user's choices either locally or remotely on the
site/the webapp server. Maybe a future version of html could endorse
support for such (if not convenient at the moment). Perhaps an element
could have an "activators" attribute holding the id of an "activatorset"
element, which could be something like,
<activatorset id="foo">
<sequence type="keys">
<key type="identifier" state="down" value="a_unicode_value_here" />
<key type="modifier" state="down" value="&defaultModifiers;" />
<!-- a state of 'down' stands for a contemporary pression,
regardless the order
of items declaration, and there can be any order for
releasing pressed keys,
but after the first release (state="up"), any other
pression must happen after
the released key - or mouse button -->
<key type="special" state="down" value="&arrow_left;" />
<key type="any" state="up" />
<!-- when every declared item is released, the command fires and
synthetic click activation
steps are run, perhaps adding an "activation" event
carrying the proper sequence of keys
and mouse actions, so the developer can choose among
handling the (sinthetic) click,
the "activation" event or the DOMActivate event -->
</sequence><!-- the first activation sequence is defined, any other
is an alternative way to activate a control -->
<sequence type="mouse">
<mousebutton type="left" state="down" />
<mousebutton type="right" state="down" />
<!-- here state has the same meaning of above: users can press
them contemprary, or one first, then
the other while still holding the other down -->
<mousebehaviour type="move-right" />
<mousebehaviour type="wheel" value="-3" />
<!-- mouse behaviours should happen in order, however the only
needed requirements is to respect
the order of pressions and releasing -->
<mousebutton type="any" state="up" />
</sequence>
<sequence type="mix" > <!-- keys and mouse -->
<key type="modifier" state="down" value="&AltGraph;" /> <!--
entyties to be defined somewhere -->
<mousebutton type="right" state="down" />
<mousebutton type="right" state="up" />
<key type="identifier" state="down" value="unicode_here" />
<mousebutton type="left" state="down" />
<mousebutton type="left" state="up"/>
<key type="any" state="up" />
</sequence>
<sequence type="external" /><!-- this should be implied and refers
to any other type of activation,
such as pressing
tab then enter, or focusing elements by voice -
a further
version could cover direct speech activation - or just
clicking over
the element -->
</activatorset>
the above could be a node descendent from an <activators> element, which
might be enabled or disabled, and have no children, but a "src"
attribute keeping a URL targeting an XML file, with the above format and
a root element calle <activators> as well, so to be able to just keep
any descendent activatorset and put it in the document. Such xml schema
could be the format for users preferences remotely (or locally) stored,
though I'd leave to the web application a chance to choose whether to
let the user redefine default actions or not (anyway, there will be
always a chance to clash with both browser and operative system default
behaviours).
Any other idea? Just propose it. Come on, let's change the world! :-P
Regards, Alex.
--
Caselle da 1GB, trasmetti allegati fino a 3GB e in piu' IMAP, POP3 e SMTP
autenticato? GRATIS solo con Email.it http://www.email.it/f
Sponsor:
Scopri le supernovità dei games per cellulare! Giocale tutte!
Clicca qui: http://adv.email.it/cgi-bin/foclick.cgi?mid=8271&d=30-11
