217770 - Behavior of Tab key in mail/news window unexpected

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Aponar Kestrel]

User-Agent:       SpaceBison/0.01 [fu] (Win67; X; SK)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

4.x's tab key behavior was more conducive to keyboard control of the mail/news window; the newer behavior makes pure keyboard control more difficult, and does not appear to make anything else easier in trade.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a mailbox or newsgroup.
2. Click on any entry, and wait for it to load in the bottom pane.
3. Press Tab.

Actual Results:  
The focus moved to the (copyable but otherwise noninteractive) Subject: header. Repeated tabbing shifts to the Date: header (or date, if headers are collapsed), Newsgroup: header (if shown), Followups-to: header, and finally to the message pane proper.

Expected Results:  
The focus should have moved directly to the message pane proper, so that the window could be scrolled up and down with the arrow keys.

Comment 1

[Bernard Alleysson]

confirming windows server 2003 mozilla 1.5b
this makes sense to me

Comment 2

[Aponar Kestrel]

Attachment: Tentative patch (ugly side-effect)

Attached a patch -- alright, a *hack* -- that alters this behavior...

Now, if (and only if) the header-pane is collapsed, Tab skips the subject and
date -- at the cost of not being able to select them at all. This is decidedly
suboptimal, and prevents application of equivalent patches to the expanded
pane's layout (unless you're willing to forfeit selection and copying of
headers
entirely short of View Source).

The other options, as far as I can tell, are:
 1) Set the 'tabIndex' field of the label to something nonzero.
   - This will leave the field in the tabbing order, but at the very end; this
     is perhaps harmless, but also... uncouth.
 2) Provide a method to remove objects from the tabbing order.
   - The usual suggested method is to make a negative tabIndex have this
effect,
     and I believe IE does this -- in direct contravention of the W3C standard,

     alas; see bug 56809.
 3) Mark this bug VERIFIED WONTFIX.

Any better ideas?

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

xref bug 165999