Feature - tabbing behaviour

November 5, 2007 3:09 PM

Pedantfilter: Changing the order of tabbing to ease my tired, jaded, old fingers.

When you use tab to exit the comment box, as is (to my knowledge) fairly usual browser behaviour, it is a bit annoying to have to tab 3 times to the 'post' box to press 'enter'. Currently, it tabs through the user (er, that'd be me) and then the timestamp before this, which seems odd. I can't think of a situation where you'd want to go to those locations before posting.

I suspect that no-one else is sufficiently bothered to have picked it out, but if the order could be changed to tab straight to the 'post' (or even the preview, I guess) button, that'd be awesome.

Green?

posted by Brockles to Feature Requests at 3:09 PM (34 comments total)

That's not a bad idea. Any reason that can't be changed around?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:12 PM on November 5, 2007

When you use tab to exit the comment box, as is (to my knowledge) fairly usual browser behaviour, it is a bit annoying to have to tab 3 times to the 'post' box to press 'enter'.

I don't really have a problem with the suggestion, but for what it's worth I'd bet that the most common browser behavior here is to grab the mouse and click the button, so this may not be bothering a whole lot of people, relatively speaking.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:12 PM on November 5, 2007

If the bit where it says "Live Preview" was made into a clicky thing that does the same as the Preview button, this behaviour could be achieved without really changing much.
posted by nowonmai at 3:22 PM on November 5, 2007

I figured out why Hello Kitty doesn't have a mouth.

It's because she lives most of her life in the larval stage. She's only an adult for one day, just long enough to reproduce and not long enough to need nutrition.

The reason you never see Hello Kitty larvae?

They're ugly.
posted by Afroblanco at 3:27 PM on November 5, 2007 [4 favorites]

If the comment area is blank, tab takes you to Preview. So, this seems like something that worked at one time, but was broken by Live Preview..
posted by Chuckles at 3:29 PM on November 5, 2007

Flickr used to tab this way, too - from the box to the 'some HTML is ok' link to 'preview' to 'post', but they changed that too.



/was involved in the whining about it there, too. :)
posted by Brockles at 3:31 PM on November 5, 2007

Oh.. Post Comment is grayed out, and that is why it jumps to preview.. Oops..
posted by Chuckles at 3:31 PM on November 5, 2007

Yeah, if there's a tabindex thing I could do, I'd do that. Anyone got any ideas on how to do that?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:38 PM on November 5, 2007

In all seriousness, do you know anyone at Flickr? Cos they did it there...
posted by Brockles at 3:41 PM on November 5, 2007

Hrm. If I've typed something in this here comment box thingy, and then hit tab, it goes down to the search field in the lower right of the metafilter page. Tabbing again takes me to the browser's URL field. Tabbing three times takes me to the google search field. Keep tabbing and it takes you to other various fields (tab name, upper right search field, etc), but not ever to allow you to post. Mouse only, it seems.

Am I crazy? Firefox on OS X.

Sorry for the derail. I just was trying to understand the question, and, well, it makes no sense to me.
posted by Stewriffic at 3:45 PM on November 5, 2007

I'm on Firefox (well, I was, I'm now on Bonecho - Firefox derivative) and both - when typing in the box and hitting tab from there - go to 'Brockles' and then the timestamp in the live preview, then to the 'post comment' box.

I have no extensions or any greasemonkey shenanigans, do you?
posted by Brockles at 3:49 PM on November 5, 2007

Just out of interest, would removing the links from the live preview sort it? There'd be nothing between the two to link to, and there's no real need for them to be live links, is there?
posted by Brockles at 3:50 PM on November 5, 2007

I've never used it, but apparently modern browsers support html tabindex.
posted by Partial Law at 3:53 PM on November 5, 2007

I have no extensions or anything weird. I don't even know how to do that stuff. It will eventually circle back to the comment field after hitting tab 7 times. It never goes to my username or preview or timestamp. There's one time (tab #5) where I can't even tell where it goes.
posted by Stewriffic at 3:54 PM on November 5, 2007

(Tell me to shut my piehole, btw, if none of this info is relevant. I'm cool with that.)
posted by Stewriffic at 3:56 PM on November 5, 2007

Just out of interest, would removing the links from the live preview sort it? There'd be nothing between the two to link to, and there's no real need for them to be live links, is there?

Hit the brakes, pardner. The links in Live Preview are really, really useful for those of us who use that, rather than the Preview button proper, to check our links.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:58 PM on November 5, 2007 [2 favorites]

Weird, it works fine on Safari 3 on XP. Tab takes ya to Post Comment. Camino on Panther does not.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:01 PM on November 5, 2007

test
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:02 PM on November 5, 2007

Ah, I didn't think of a post that had links in itself other than the site ones.

testing

Yeah. It tabs through them, too. The links are useful, but is tabbing to them useful? (more than being able to tab straight to the post box every time?)
posted by Brockles at 4:02 PM on November 5, 2007

Can I just hit return after typing a coment?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:03 PM on November 5, 2007

My bad, hitting tab then enter works fine in Camino.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:03 PM on November 5, 2007

I'm with cortex on this one, Live Preview is where I double-check my links. Changing that would make me cry.
posted by quin at 4:19 PM on November 5, 2007

Can I just hit return after typing a coment?

Wouldn't that just give you a line break/ carriage return?
posted by quin at 4:20 PM on November 5, 2007

The links are useful, but is tabbing to them useful?

Tabbing through them isn't particularly useful to me—I never do it—but I'm not sure if that's behavior that we can alter from the server side so much as a browser choice. Don't quote me on that, though.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:21 PM on November 5, 2007

Wouldn't that just give you a line break/ carriage return?

Yep.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:27 PM on November 5, 2007

My suggestion was the best.
posted by nowonmai at 5:02 PM on November 5, 2007

Just a quiet vote for making this work better. There are LOTS of us out there using keyboard navigation to do everything, and far faster. Mousing sucks.

I live by the Mozilla / Firefox find-as-you-type feature ...
posted by intermod at 7:36 PM on November 5, 2007

*tabs*

Oh for fucks sake, a couple extra tabs won't kill you! The exercise will do you some good, I'll wager!
posted by SassHat at 8:23 PM on November 5, 2007

Future generations are going to laugh their asses off at the fact that humans once had to type individual letters with their fingers and roll little "mice" around to get computers to work.
posted by mediareport at 8:50 PM on November 5, 2007

*picks up mouse, holds near mouth*

Helloooo, Computer.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:12 PM on November 5, 2007 [3 favorites]

Unless I'm missing some inherent functionality that needs to be protected, you can do this simply by giving the textarea input and post comment button input tabIndex="x" & "x+1" values respectively. In order not to break existing tab behaviour (nothing else has tabIndex so they would then automatically be the first things you went to upon hitting tab) you could add them as attributes via script when live preview first kicks in and does something.
posted by Sparx at 6:40 AM on November 6, 2007

The problem here isn't tab index. Those who are complaining have their browsers set to tab through links as well as buttons. It just so happens that these links appear before the buttons do. I'm not certain about this but I think tabindex is only relevant when you're talking about items in a form, not other links, right?

And even if you're not, using tabindexes to jump users to the post button is breaking the user experience. What if someone needs to use keyboard navigation, and wants to check out one of the links they are using? They won't be able to tab to the links to check them.

I vote for keeping things as they are. It's a few extra tabs, behaving totally, totally predictably. Change the tabbing order and it might be a problem for some people. For those of you who are hating on the extra links tabbed to, you can always change your Firefox prefs so that tabbing ignores links.
posted by Deathalicious at 8:41 AM on November 6, 2007

Or the existing "Live Preview" text could be made into a link to Preview, thereby achieving the bhaviour thet Brockles wants without the expenditure of significant effort.
posted by nowonmai at 8:52 AM on November 6, 2007

tabindex is only relevant when you're talking about items in a form, not other links, right?

Yes - and tabIndex will overide those links if they're between form items. I can see how that would be a problem for those wanting to tab through links, however.

you can always change your Firefox prefs so that tabbing ignores links.

Neato - I did not know that. That would solve the problem, albeit for firefox users (and possibly others).
posted by Sparx at 9:04 AM on November 6, 2007