Rapid Application Development with Mozilla™

6.5. Hands On: NoteTaker User Input

In this session, we'll add key support and a few event handlers to the NoteTaker dialog box. There is further discussion on event handlers in “Hands On” in Chapter 13, Listboxes and Trees. There, a systematic approach is considered. This session contains simple introductory code only.

The key support we want comes in two parts: We want the user to have a hint at what keys can be pressed and we want the actual keystrokes to do something.

To add key hints, we use the accesskey attribute. This attribute serves as the basis for disabled use of the application, but we're not designing for disabled users at this point. Instead, we're just exploiting the fact that this attribute underlines a useful character of text ...