133649 - Space bar on button causes page to scroll instead of activating

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Taral]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.0 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020313
BuildID:    0.9.9

If you tab to either of the big orange buttons on the page and push the space
bar, gecko will attempt to scroll the view instead of activating the button.
This is most annoying, since buttons can usually be activated by pushing the
space bar.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to URL.
2. Make window small.
3. Tab to first orange button.
4. Push space bar.

Actual Results:  Window scrolls.

Expected Results:  Login data should be submitted.

Comment 1

[Taral]

Also verified on Mozilla 0.9.9 (so it's not a galeon problem).

Comment 2

[Andrew Schultz]

The "button" is not really a form button, but rather an image inside an link tag
which activates Javascript that submits the form.  The standard behavior in this
case (image in a link tag) seems to be to scroll when you hit the spacebar.  You
can still hit enter (on the image) to submit the form.

Comment 3

[Taral]

This still seems to be strange behavior, although much more understandable. Is
it therefore the official position that the current behavior is the correct one?
I admit that it would be confusing to change the behavior only for images in links.

Comment 4

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

tab to a link and press "space" - it's the same.

Comment 5

[Taral]

We're talking about BUTTONS here. Tab to a button and push "space" and it
activates. There's an interface parity problem here.

Comment 6

[Andrew Schultz]

when is a button not a button?  when it's an image

==> keyboard nav

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

It's a link, that's fooling you into thinking it's a button. Space bar doesn't
activate links. If it did, it wouldn't work very well for page down, because
it's usually a link that's focused in a page.

We feel your pain, but if the page author is going to avoid the semantics of
button, and avoid using input type=image, there's nothing we can do about it.

If you use Enter, you're okay.

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying Wontfix bugs.

mail filter string for bugspam: Tursiopstruncatus