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Re: detect if user can generate key events ?

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2012-01-10 13:25, Peter Billam wrote:

> I wanted to leave myself the option of reacting to partial lines,
> or only to certain characters, and also to learn about kbd events,
> to implement an imitation vi etc.

Learning is fine, but KISS (Keep it simple, sir!) rules when you wish to 
produce something that others can use.

>> The page uses one of the old methods of writing Esperanto in Ascii
>> only, the “x notation.” As implemented, the logic of the page means
>> that even though I can normally perfectly well write Esperanto as
>> such, using e.g.  c with circumflex (ĉ), on this page it won’t work,
>
> Indeed, and it's a big issue with cut and paste where you
> don't have the freedom to type.

This point of mine was not about cut and paste; it was about keyboard 
input that uses dead keys. Acting on key presses can be useful in some 
contexts, but it should not prevent the user from typing normally.

> Of course if the page handled
> diacriticals I'd still want to respect the x notation;
> it's very ergonomic on non-esperanto keyboards.

You could still handle both the “x notation” and the “h notation,” if 
you used just a text input field and performed simple string 
manipulation (actually, just simple replacements) on it. Accepting cx or 
ch for ĉ should not mess things up when the user actually types ĉ.

Technically, you could effectively turn “x” to an equivalent of a dead 
key (e.g., when the user types “x” after “c,” the “c” turns to “ĉ” 
immediately), but I think this would fall into the category of 
outsmarting oneself. A less intrusive way would be to add small buttons 
for writing characters like “ĉ”, which is fairly simple, cf. to the 
Turkish input gadget at
http://bytelevelbooks.com/code/javascript/turkish-input.html

I’m not saying that such buttons have high usability; I’m saying that 
they hardly disturb anyone, and they offer an intuitively obvious way of 
entering special characters that might be needed in a specific context.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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detect if user can generate key events ? Peter Billam <peter@www.pjb.com.au> - 2012-01-10 09:08 +0000
  Re: detect if user can generate key events ? "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-01-10 11:35 +0200
    Re: detect if user can generate key events ? Peter Billam <peter@www.pjb.com.au> - 2012-01-10 11:25 +0000
      Re: detect if user can generate key events ? "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2012-01-10 13:47 +0200
    Re: detect if user can generate key events ? Swifty <steve.j.swift@gmail.com> - 2012-01-10 12:33 +0000
      Re: detect if user can generate key events ? Captain Paralytic <paul_lautman@yahoo.com> - 2012-01-10 05:30 -0800

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