Re: Guidelines - events

I don't think that recommending against using 
onClick and similar attributes is that good.
The reason being that it may encourage people
to do the wrong thing.

For example one can write a gracefully transforming  
JavaScript thing with:

<A href="some-url" onClick="some-script">some text</A>

Now if we disallow using onClick he may write 
<A href="some-script">some text</A>

that (depending on the script) may work just as before with
Javascript on. But doesn't work otherwise.
(The second construct is invalid as some-script will not 
be a valid URL but validators don't report errors in CDATA 
attribue values.)

Another problem with excluding all these atributes, is that they 
constitute all the "intristic-event" generic attributes, so it would 
be very difficult to use scripts to the extent that script fans 
will forget about the WAI.

I think we should find the analogies between mouse events and 
keyboard and speach and make a note of that in User-Agent guidelines.

One should remember that the names of the attributes are 
platform specific due to the fact that most were introduced as 
vendor extentions, but some of them have clear analogies: 
onClick and the sugested onActivate, for example.

Regards,

Nir Dagan                            
Assistant Professor of Economics      
Universidad Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona (Spain)

website: http://www.nirdagan.com
email: nir.dagan@econ.upf.es

"There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory." 
-- A. Einstein

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 1998 12:40:33 UTC