Closed Bug 64078 Opened 24 years ago Closed 23 years ago

[rfe] hit space to drop down focused drop-down listbox

Categories

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement, P2)

Product:
Core
Component:
DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 57192
Milestone:
mozilla1.0

People

(Reporter: jruderman, Assigned: rods)

References

(
URL
)

Details

I can't figure out how to get the drop-down listboxes on 
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi to drop down in IE or Mozilla using only 
the keyboard.  (The arrow keys move through the items, but it's often important 
to be able to see all of the options at once.)  It would be cool if you could 
make the menu part of the control drop down using the space key.

Mpt, is there a way to do this on the Mac with the equivalent Mac control?
Just noticed that in prefs (but not on webpages), the arrow keys make the drop-
down menu appear instead of just cycling through the options.
I think Alt+ArrowDown should also open the box, see bug 62425.
Suggest Platform=ALL, OS=ALL
Traditionally on windows pressing f4 drops down the listbox. Unfortunately ie 
recently broke that behavior.  Alt-Down Arrow also does this.  I'd prefer both 
to work for all listboxes.

(cc) mac people for recommendations about mac keyboard behaviors.

Jesse: file a separate bug for the prefs xbl erroroneous response, as you know, 
arrows [up/left,down/right] should select previous, and successor w/o dropping 
down the list.
OS: Windows 98 → All
Hardware: PC → All
There is no established behavior for this on Mac OS, however, I would have the
list display the menu if you used the up/down arrows on it. Note that popup
menus could have submenus, so you wouldn't want to have left/right doing
anything unless you were on a submenu item in the main menu. And trying to do
submenus without displaying the parent/child menu is too confusing to
manipulate.

Besides...the point of the menu is to show you the available choices. It just
seems wrong to have a menu, and use it, without seeing it.

It's been previously proposed to allow keyboard navigation of menus to select,
rather than skip over, inactive menu items for the purpose of having a
consistent number of keypresses select a particular menu item. I don't believe
this would work very well unless you pop up the menu; you can't select a
disabled item in a menu, so people might get confused if they arrow down to a
disabled menu item, tab out of the popup/listbox, and have it change back. The
difference between active/disabled items in a menu are obvious when you can see
two different items; it's not always as clear when you can only see one disabled
item.

If that confused anyone, let me know, and I'll try and clarify.
This is for html listboxes, which i suppose can have submenus, <ARG>, I don't 
know if we support this, I'm 99% sure we don't.

AFAIK HTML listboxes aren't allowed to have disabled list items [If they can 
I'll go shoot someone]. assume they can't.

For now, let's assume a listbox has linear and not treelike navigation.
<p class="trivial">In such a circumstance, it's ok for left/right to work like 
up and down.</p>

my conclusion from your comments is that you'd prefer up/down to pop the 
listbox down. I resume that you would want the currently selected item to 
remain selected [alt-down|f4 only show the list, they don't change the current 
selection]

fwiw, alt-down, alt-down => NOOP. alt-up and alt-down are equivalent. [support 
both]
I was talking about listboxes in general; why shouldn't a pop-up menu in the
prefs have a disabled item? And why should keyboard access behavior be any
different for those than in html view?

I have seen (but can't find, at the moment) documentation for the popup menu
html form elements to allow for nested submenus. I don't recall if it's part of
any real standard, but there is at least a proposal somewhere. Regardless, since
it is very likely a popup menu could potentially have nested elements, you can't
make the assumption that it won't happen.

F4 is a silly key combination to use, I think (it's too close to alt-F4, which
closes windows on Windows), and it has absolutely no meaning to Mac users; the
F1-F15 keys on the keyboard are used almost exclusively by programs which allow
the user to configure custom keybindings, programs with excessive menu items
that need to be keyboard activated, and by extensions that allow users to create
macros.

Also, why do you even want to use F4? It means 'Paste' in a lot of contexts.
the HTML 4 spec allows for one level of sub-items in listboxes. Mozilla supports
this with some wierd indentation.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#edef-OPTGROUP

there is a Note there that future html standards may allow for nested optgroups,
but it's not part of the standard right now.
Just to make an observation: According to the url that Alec just provided, it is
possible for option (and button, input, optgroup, select, and textarea) form
elements to have disabled items. 
Mac OS does not allow any keyboard navigation of listboxes/popup menus.

(well apart from Easy Access, but that works by allowing the user to manipulate 
the mouse pointer using the cursor keys) 
LordPixel: True, however, I have the feeling that Mac OS X might provide this 
capability, since, if you select a menu in the menubar, you can use the left/
right arrow keys to move among menus (but you can't use up/down to go into a 
menu, which I suspect is a bug).

Timeless: filed bug 64157 for xbl drop-down listboxes.
One problem with space is that it won't work in comboboxes, where you can type 
arbitrary text /or/ use it as a drop-down listbox.  On the other hand, mpt and 
I both thought of it and thought it would make sense (57192), and neither F4 
nor alt-down is obvious.

See bug 57192 for F4 for opening drop-down listboxes and comboboxes on Windows.
So bug 57192 is for popup menus in HTML forms, and this bug is for popup menus in 
XUL.

Summary:

          Windows                Other platforms
----------------------------------------------------------
Space     open/select and close  open/select and close
Up        select previous item   open/select previous item
Down      select next item       open/select next item
Alt+Up    open/close             --
Alt+Down  open/close             --
F4        open/close             --

Is that right?

(Jesse, if you find any occurrences of combo boxes in Mozilla, file them as bugs, 
since they do nothing that can't be done better using other UI controls
<http://mackido.com/Interface/ComboBox.html>.)
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Priority: -- → P2
Target Milestone: --- → mozilla1.0
-> rods - combo box keyboard stuff
Assignee: alecf → rods
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 57192 ***
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 23 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
Verified Duplicate
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
neil.marshall@sympatico.ca pointed out in n.p.m.ui that this wouldn't work for 
comboboxes, such as the location bar, where typing a space has a different 
meaning.
Component: Keyboard: Navigation → User events and focus handling
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.