Spatial Keyboard Navigation • Hacker News Board

Re: Spatial Keyboard Navigation

#21

Post by RheingoldRiver » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

Varriount wrote: post #12

While I do agree with the latter 2 points, (can't multi-jump, hard to memorize), the assertion It follows the order of the DOM elements and not the visual position of these elements on the page, which means that it uses the HTML structure (not user-friendly), but it should go after the layout position (spatial position); Isn't quite true - all HTML elements support the "tabindex" attribute[0], which can be used to se…

Better than tabindex is assigning semantically-sound access keys (alt+shift+some-letter-that-makes-sense-for-the-task).

For example on Wikipedia (and in MediaWiki in general), Alt+Shift+F is search (I guess F is for Find; S is already taken by Save anyway, for people who edit).

There's a lot of them, though most of them immediately navigate you rather than focus an element - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Keyboard_shortcuts

Re: Spatial Keyboard Navigation

#22

Post by aasasd » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

Ah, yes, hijacking the arrow keys. So it breaks both arrow-key scrolling and selecting a previous input in a text field—or selecting autocompletion results, or perhaps other ‘rich’ input functions.

Re: Spatial Keyboard Navigation

#23

Post by candyking » Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

Looks cool but I don't like the idea of pushing a library on the user when they would most likely not use that kind of navigation anyway. Ever wonder why your browser is using 16Gb of RAM? This is why.

If the user is already using the keyboard to navigate, it would be better for them to install an extension like Vimium (which I think is vastly superior because it affects the whole browser.)

With this navigation I would potentially have to do more than 10 key presses to reach what I am looking for and with Vimium I have to press at most 3 no matter where on the page I want to go.