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Historical discussions of spatial navigation

Jihye Hong edited this page Nov 20, 2017 · 3 revisions

Historical discussions of spatial navigation

Spatial navigation in the web isn't a new feature, tracing back to about ten years, it has a complicated history. At first, spatial navigation was considered for some reasons:

  • Sequential navigation(using tab key) worked well in the simple and nicely designed websites, but not on the complex websites such as:
    • The page with a lot of focusable elements
    • The page which has a complex two-dimensional layout that cannot be captured in the one-dimensional tab order.
  • TV browsers or feature phone browsers became in general use.
  • Various four-way directional input devices (TV remote controller, D-pad, etc) are used in several industries.

Spatial navigation in Opera

Usage

  • Press shift + arrow keys to move the focus to the next logical selection in that direction.
  • Press spacebar + arrow keys to scroll the page

Issues

  • The next focusable item in any direction isn't always obvious.
  • Heavy use of JavaScript page manipulation appears to interfere with spatial navigation in some cases.

Link

https://blog.codinghorror.com/spatial-navigation-and-opera/

2011-08 Implementation for nav-* properties in CSS3-UI module in Webkit

Link

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66027

Summary

This is a request for the implementation about nav-up nav-down nav-left nav-right properties in CSS3-UI in Webkit.

2013-06 Intent to Implement and Ship: CSS3 nav-up/down/left/right properties in Blink

Link

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/u2lKAP3EiU4

Summary

This is an intent for the implementation of CSS3 nav-up/down/left/right properties from CSS3 UI.

2016-05 Intent to Implement and Ship: CSS3 nav-up/down/left/right properties in Blink

Link

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/g09B730nI80/tWiUWVWFAQAJ

Summary

References

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