That well known former playboy and drunkard, Matt Jones, reminded me
that I something to write.
Bugzilla.mozilla.org recently got upgraded, and they added a feature so obvious, useful, and simple that we should all be kicking ourselves that it is not a standard.
They've added accesskeys to their horrendously complicated form
which is good, but more than that, they've adopted the Windows standard
of underlining the accesskey letter in the label. (it's much easier to
explore this on bugzilla than for me to explain it -try hitting ALT + an
underlined letter on the horrendously complicated form
so bugzilla's accesskeys are unobtrusively labelled (for those who don't
need them) but discoverable, and on-the-page for those who do.
Suddenly I can keyboard navigate that horrendous form as easily as I do
Word, instead of being limited to thousands of presses of TAB/SHIFT+TAB.
Now, you could apply this beautiful device to any site.
You could even write a proxy script, similar to betsie, that adds
accesskeys and appropriate underlining to any page on the web:
If the first letter has already been used, try the second. If that's
been used, use the first anyway (since accesskeys cycle (I hope), the user just
has to hit alt-x twice to reach the second link)
And for extra points, you could make that script augment any image links
with their ALT-tag (as a link also), thereby enabling Find As You Type, even for sites with stupid giftext.
This might be icky on some sites, but it'd be a lot less icky than what we mouseless have to deal with now.
And if you did that, the world shower you with love, because you would
have made it a far more accessible place.
so what did happen to that Lazyweb, then?