On 11/6/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Forwarding here given en: users' fondness for js extensions.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com Date: 31-Oct-2006 04:48 Subject: [Wikitech-l] Changes to accesskeys and tooltips To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
Pretty soon, likely within the next week, I'll be moving all accesskeys and tooltips out of Monobook.js and implement them server-side.
Why?????
Because putting them in JS is bad for accessibility. Cell phones, for instance, will often as not have no JS support, or have JS off for default. Other non-conventional browsers may or may not apply the JS correctly. You'll still be able to modify all the tooltips and accesskeys via JavaScript, just using slightly different calls (i.e., getting the element by ID instead of modifying the ta array).
Now that you mention it, though, to ease the shock it seems like a good idea to apply stuff from the ta array anyway, if it exists, so that old JS modifications still work. I'll be sure to implement that, so you don't have to worry about *that* breaking your scripts, although do consider that array deprecated. This is more like a few weeks off, though, and that from now; I was a bit optimistic with my estimate.
I assume you missed my announcement about revamping all the id's. :) Don't worry, that *will* get properly announced to all the right places (not just wikitech-l, also various other significant lists and hopefully all the sites' JS/CSS pages), with the full list of changes and at least a week in advance, but the lack of standardization in those can cause odd bugs--i.e., conflicts with users' id's, classes, and headings. There's no point in letting these scripts accumulate indefinitely based on flawed id's.