acceskey support
acceskey support
Hello,
Would it make sense to add an optional access key[1] to DataTables' search (and perhaps other?) controls, allowing power users to navigate the data more quickly.
Of course this is trivial to retrofit from the outside[2], but the advantage of core support might be handling (or at least warning of) conflicts in case multiple controls use the same access key.
I'm not sure whether this is worth the trouble (bloat?), but I figured it was worth discussing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_key
[2] [code]jQuery(".dataTables_filter input").attr("accesskey", "s")[/code]
Would it make sense to add an optional access key[1] to DataTables' search (and perhaps other?) controls, allowing power users to navigate the data more quickly.
Of course this is trivial to retrofit from the outside[2], but the advantage of core support might be handling (or at least warning of) conflicts in case multiple controls use the same access key.
I'm not sure whether this is worth the trouble (bloat?), but I figured it was worth discussing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_key
[2] [code]jQuery(".dataTables_filter input").attr("accesskey", "s")[/code]
This discussion has been closed.
Replies
Absolutely worth discussing! Thanks for the suggestion.
It certainly would be possible to add it into the core, but it would need to be fully configurable in terms of what keys are used to access what controls and to be able to turn it off completely. So it would add a bit of code the to core - probably 1-2K.
What I would be interested to know is how many end users would actively use this - or indeed know about it - i.e. is it something that is going to be used, or would it be used in only a small minority of cases. I suspect the latter since I think this is the first request for this particular feature. Thus at the moment I don't think I'll include this in the core.
If anyone else would like to vote / comment, please do add a comment and I will consider it for future releases. Until then, as noted it is trivial to add custom with a few lines of jQuery :-)
Regards,
Allan
Sounds reasonable. I concur that most people probably don't know about access keys (though UI hints might remedy that) and it's likely a minority feature (despite the recent surge in keyboard shortcuts across sites like Twitter, GitHub etc.) - so it's probably best to keep this separate.