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I'm working on replacing key names in Firefox with newer WD's key names. While I'm working on this, I realized that it's difficult to search the code which uses KeyboardEvent.key. The reasons are: * .key is too generic name. * Defined key names don't have any mark such as common prefix. I think that renaming .key may breaks a few web applications which already use .key attribute only on supported browsers. On the other hand, if we can add common prefix e.g., "KeyName" to the predefined key names, everybody can search such code with using regexp (KeyName[A-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]+). Additionally, event.key.match() allows to check if the key event is caused by printable key in almost all cases. (If there is no key which inputs "KeyNameFoo"!) This change may too late. However, at least, it's worthwhile to discuss this issue.
From our teleconf: http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/21-Jan-2014 Re: 23943, I think it's too late to change the name from 'key' to anything else since there are existing implementations. Although I agree tha the name is unfortunate. Same with 'code'. Sadly the better names like 'keyCode' were already taken. As for the 'key' values, we did clean them up a bit and added prefixes where they made sense. You can't search for all the possible 'key' values since they can be any Unicode