NYCPHP Meetup

[Peter Sawczynec]

So are we saying that "id" and "name" will be used in favor of
"accesskey". It was my impression that ultimately it 

was "id" that was supposed to win out as the way to address all the
elements in the DOM. Is that right?

 

 Peter

 

From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org]
On Behalf Of Allen Shaw
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 11:49 AM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] html 5

 

Daniel Convissor wrote: 

Hi Folks:
 
A new version of HTML is being proposed.  Here are the changes 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/.  ...
One major thing I like is being removed: accesskey.  This allows me (and

other users, I suppose) to keyboard navigate through web pages and
forms.  
I also see "summary" and "abbr" is being pulled from table related 
elements.  Perhpas these are being replaced with some other elements or 
attributes, but I didn't notice such in my quick look over the working 
draft.

As of a week ago, this commenter to the w3c proposal didn't notice a
replacement for accesskey either, mentioning "the deprecation of the
accesskey attribute (with no stated replacement)":
 
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Jan/0015.h
tml>
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Jan/0015.h
tml>

I agree it's a major feature, and I wonder why it's being deprecated, as
I find it incredibly useful (I primarily design targeted applications,
not public Web sites).

This page points out that for public web sites there are many things
that can get in the way of accesskey definitions, namely user agents
that are already using various accesskeys for their own features, so
that there are only 3 keys out of the US-typical qwerty keyboard that
are not used (and thus effectively blocked) by at least one of these
user agents.
 <http://www.wats.ca/show.php?contentid=32>
<http://www.wats.ca/show.php?contentid=32>

Finally, this page at the w3c wiki shows some rationale from both sides
-- to include accesskeys or not.  It mentions that "An alternate,
superior mechanism can be found in the XHTML access module
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-access.html#edef_access_access>
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-access.html#edef_access_access>, which
supports essential semantics for accesskey navigation, but without the
device dependency restrictions of accesskey as defined in HTML 4.01.":
 <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/DroppedAttributeAccesskey>
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/DroppedAttributeAccesskey>

I'm no advocate, so I likely won't be trying to make my voice heard in
any of this, but I'm quietly hoping that either accesskey is added to
the html5 spec, or that I'll be able to make use of a standardized
replacement.

- Allen






-- 
Allen Shaw
slidePresenter (http://slides.sourceforge.net)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20080201/aadbc56b/attachment.html>