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is accesskey obsolete?

By anders pearson 16 Jun 2003

folks in the webdesign community today have been linking to and talking about this <a href=”http://www.alistapart.com/stories/accesskeys/“>ALA article</a> about <a href=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey”>accesskey</a>.

i’m all for accessibility for web-pages and applications. but i have to ask if the use of <tt>accesskey</tt> is more or less obviated by mozilla’s “<a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html”>find as you type</a>” feature.

i hate mice and strongly prefer using the keyboard for as much of my interaction with my computer as possible. until mozilla introduced find as you type, browsing the web was about the only computer activity i engaged in for any substantial amount of time that i actually had to use my mouse for. (<a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html”>bash</a>, <a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html”>emacs</a>, and <a href=”http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/“>ion</a> being my other main apps).

now, with find as you type, i almost never need to use the mouse except when i hit the occasional flash site or sites that use graphical elements for navigation in ways that make it difficult to tab to the link i want.

to me, find as you type just looks like a better designed solution to the problem of navigating the web using only the keyboard than <tt>accesskey</tt> does. the big problem with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that it requires webmasters to specifically add it to every site. in mozilla, find as you type <em>just works</em> on <strong>every</strong> site (well, every site that uses text-based links for navigation). no extra development work needed. with <tt>accesskey</tt>, users have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts for each site they visit. that means that designers must somehow provide visual cues for the user to let them know what shortcut is for each link (the ALA article gives some excellent advice on how to do that). find as you type works the same on every site that it works on. another subtle issue with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that someone has to come up with all of the mappings. this leaves a lot of room for overlap and confusion. does ‘h’ mean “home” or “help”? what happens when you have 100 links on a page? do you actually expect a developer to sit down and try to come up with a shortcut for each of them? they certainly aren’t all going to make sense let alone be obvious.

the only big problem with find as you type is that it’s only available to users of late-model mozillas. hopefully that will change someday.

as far as i can tell, just about everything that can be done with <tt>accesskey</tt> can also be done with find as you type and there are far fewer problems. so why do we still care about accesskey?

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

By anders pearson 10 Jun 2003

the other week the sci-fi channel was showing a movie called <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Title?0264508”>Dagon</a>, which was loosely based on HP Lovecraft’s <a href=”http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/works/innsmouth.htm”>The Shadow over Innsmouth</a>. as a Lovecraft fanatic, i had no choice but to watch. unfortunately, as i’ve pretty much come to expect from HP Lovecraft stories turned into movies, it really sucked. they moved it from new england to the coast of spain which seems criminal to me since the new england atmosphere was so important to Lovecraft. they added a few characters, changed the plot so it doesn’t really make sense anymore and destroyed what was left with bad acting and cheesy special effects.

why has no one ever been able to make a decent movie out of a Lovecraft story? more importantly, why has no one ever really even tried? all it would take would be a half-way competent director and a little bit of a budget to hire a cast that can actually act and slightly better than B-movie special effects.

this

boston, etc.

By anders pearson 02 Jun 2003

too much going on for me to post anything lengthy, but here’s the brief summary of the last week:

went to boston for <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/“>OSCOM 3</a>, which was ok. stayed with kam out in mission hill. got to hang out with <a href=”http://www.goatee.net/“>joe</a> between sessions. tuck came down thursday night and we went out to see <a href=”http://www.prickmusic.com/“>Prick</a> play at the Middle East. i didn’t have very high hopes for the show since Kevin is notorious for not liking to tour or play live. i was pleasantly surprised to find that they are fantastic live. played almost all of the first album, including ‘Make Believe’, which i totally wasn’t expecting. i felt bad though because there were only about 200 people at the show. at $10/ticket, there’s no way the band was operating at a profit. hopefully they had more people at the (better advertised) long island show the next night.

friday night, through a miracle of organization, we managed to get me, <a href=”/users/tuck”>tuck</a>, <a href=”/users/emile”>emile</a>, <a href=”/users/kamden”>kam</a>, <a href=”/users/jere”>jere</a>, <a href=”/users/matti”>matti</a>, nigel, teri, and eventually <a href=”http://www.superultramega.com/“>jP</a> all together for vegan chinese food and drinks. those of us who were left at midnight went out and saw <a href=”http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/findingnemo/index.html”>Finding Nemo</a>, which was quite amusing after all those beers.

saturday tuck, kam, and i only left kam’s apartment to pick up some chinese take-out from down the block. the rest of the day was spent watching movies, playing GTA: Vice City, and working our way through a case of PBR.

sunday morning was dim sum in chinatown with jP, his brother, and some assorted other folks and then heading back to nyc.

while i was gone, lani and i’s gerbils gave birth to four little baby gerbs. i guess that answer’s the questions we had about what genders they are. we didn’t even realize that they were pregnant. the babies are tiny, hairless and have little stubs for tails. if anyone wants a couple, let me know in the next few weeks. leftovers get donated back to the pet store.

oscom

By anders pearson 21 May 2003

i’ll be in boston next week for the <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/“>Open Source Content Management Conference</a>. it looks like a pretty impressive <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/Program/“>program</a> for the price. if you live in the area and want to get together for dinner or drinks, let me know. i should be there from wednesday through the weekend.

while i’m in boston, i also plan on attending the <a href=”http://www.prickmusic.com/“>Prick</a> concert on thursday night (yes, Prick is back. they have a new album that they are only selling on their website. do your part to support artists who work outside the record industry and buy the CD.)

cellular automata toy

By anders pearson 15 May 2003

i’ve been working on simulation stuff lately at work and cellular automata play a fairly important role. my job has also involved trying out and evaluating a lot of different technologies and libraries related to python, simulations, and scientific computing in general. so as a side project to the main simulation work, i started developing a little toy program for playing with cellular automata. the idea is to keep it fairly simple so i can try out new libraries in it without much trouble.

when don hopkins was visiting in december, he recommended the book Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling to me for learning about CAs. it's a fantastic book but all of its examples are based on an MIT CAM-6 expansion card from the 80's that was a special piece of hardware designed to perfom CA operations. the card was controlled via Forth, which is a somewhat obtuse stack-based language. very cool, but with a very steep learning curve and quite unlike most programming languages any non-programmers are likely to have ever encountered.

so my goal for the cellular automata toy was to a certain extent to emulate the CAM-6 system but using python as the language to specify the rules in rather than Forth.

the current version i think turned out fairly well. it's relatively fast (on linux at least; windows seems to make it 3 or 4 times slower), very powerful, and pretty easy to use once you've got it figured out.

if you’re interested in Cellular Automata but don’t feel like coding up a whole framework yourself, maybe you’ll find it useful. basically, i learned Forth so you don’t have to.

escape from new york

By anders pearson 12 May 2003

so lani and i escaped to maine for a few days. the official reason for our trip was to go to my aunt’s wedding in bangor on friday.

we borrowed a jetta from a coworker, which was nice because buses suck, and being under 25, renting a car is crazy expensive. having the freedom to come and go as we pleased while in maine was a new experience for me at least. i usually take the bus home and while i’m there i have to beg rides off friends and family. the downside to borrowing a car is that it’s somewhat nerve-wracking. if you get in an accident or otherwise mess up a rental car, who cares? but if you put a dent in a friend’s car, you’ve got some explaining to do.

we accomplished all of our mission goals though. to and from maine without incident. no accidents, no speeding tickets, no pedestrian fatalities. we attended the wedding, managed to visit josef (only because he managed to miss his flight) and lani’s friends at Bates, had diner food, hung out with the family in dexter, took my sister’s dog for a nice long walk, and made it back to new york with a couple cases of PBR, <a href=”http://www.shipyard.com/“>Shipyard</a>, and assorted samples of flavored vodka from the new hampshire liquor store.

our gerbils were happy to see us, though i think we left them with too much food because they seem a little chubby now.

minions

By anders pearson 04 May 2003

lani and i went to the pet store yesterday with the intention of getting a hamster. we came home with a pair of gerbils instead.

    gerbil pros
  • they are very intelligent, curious, and social.
  • they're naturally desert animals so they don't produce much urine and don't smell as much as most other rodents.
  • gerbils aren't fully nocturnal, so they're actually up and active some during the day.
  • they are insanely cute.

      • gerbil cons
    • they are burrowing animals so they like to dig and scratch constantly

    currently, we’re trying to think up good names for them (the hamster names we’d been planning, like ‘MC Hamster’, aren’t really good for gerbils). then, their training will begin. soon, the world will cower before the might of our rodent army!

    in the meantime, i’ve been educating myself with help from the <a href=”http://www.gerbils.co.uk/“>National Gerbil Society</a>.

    mike hawash

    By anders pearson 29 Apr 2003

    the finally actually <a href=”http://news.com.com/2100-1028-998718.html”>charged</a> Mike Hawash (the intel engineer who’s been held in solitary confinement since march 20th). here’s a real scary bit of the article:

    It also includes reports from anonymous neighbors saying that Hawash acted more "Eastern" and grew a beard after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    crap. i better go shave and burn my chinese dictionaries before i get thrown in jail for terrorism.

    maybe star trek was right. remember the episode where the crew encountered their evil twins from a parallel universe? you could tell the evil spock from the good spock because the evil spock had a goatee. it must be true! facial hair is a sure sign of evil intentions.

    street performer protocol in action

    By anders pearson 28 Apr 2003

    for their last album two years ago, british rock band <a href=”http://www.marillion.com/“>Marillion</a> asked fans to buy the album before they’d even made it. 13,000 fans did, raising 200,000 pounds to pay for the recording process. for their next album, they’re <a href=”http://www.marillion.com/news/newalbum/index.html”>doing it again</a>.

    anyone who’s been following the post-napster music industry and generally thinking hard about how artists will make a living even if their music can be downloaded for free should recognize this as being (very nearly) an application of the <a href=”http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/#k4”>street performer protocol</a>.

    i see the fact that marillion has managed to make this work <em>quite well</em> as a good sign that the street performer protocol is a workable and realistic model for the future.