Re: Usability suggestion

For images, I think the best thing you could do is use the alt text if
it's included, and hope that the alt text is the same as the visible text on
the image button.
    For a purely graphical link, there are 2
possibilities. One is that you decide on a keyboard shortcut for it,
type the shortcut and then tab to the image and hit enter.  This is
how LaunchBar 'learns' your abreviations. For example on Mac OS X, I
trigger LaunchBar with Command-Space and then type 'te'. LB pops up a
small list of apps or files that match 'te'- including Terminal and
TextEdit. I use the arrow keys to highlight TextEdit and click
enter. Now the next time I type 'te', TextEdit is at the top of the
list and highlighted. If I use consistent abbreviations, the app/file
I want will always be at the top of the list. Of course, Konq could
only learn your abbreviations for a graphical link on a consistent web
page, like an arrow pointing right that is always there.
      If this is the first time you've visited a given URL and the
graphic link has no alt text, basically you could use this feature to
get close to it and tab over, which might be better than hitting 30
tabs, but is still not great, but I don't see any clean way to do that one.
      Note that LaunchBar does not do web links at all - it does
launching applications, switching applications, and opening files -
I just thought that it's matching algorithm would be a much cleaner
way to make a web page navigable with the keyboard as opposed to
trying to assign hotkeys to the links in a web page.  Once people get
used to LaunchBar, they get completely hooked. It really makes your
experience similar to Jeff Raskin's 'Leap' user interface on the
Cannon Cat described in his book "The Humane Interface". If we could
get something like this started for konqueror or kde in general, it
would be amazing. However, it would be very non-trivial due to the
level of sophistication you need in the match algorithm to be truly
powerful and the overhead of indexing the links in every web page
(although this could probably only be done when you activate this
mode), as well as learning the user's habits. Unfortunately, the web
site seems to make no mention of how the source code is licensed, so
I'm assuming it is proprietary, but it might be worth inquiring.

Pete

On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Sven Niedner wrote:

>
> Very cool feature, indeed. How does Launc Bar treat images that are used as
> links? I see  a big problem in this.
>
> Greetins,
>
> Sven.
> --
> La perfection est atteinte, non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter,
> mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer. -- Antoine de St. Exupéry
>