Easy Keyboard Shortcuts for Web Pages

[ Thanks to Lee
Schlesinger for this link. ]

“Web application developers should strive to provide as good an
interface for their web apps as other programmers do with desktop
programs. One simple enhancement is to provide keyboard shortcuts
to main functions, as sites such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter
do. Experienced users welcome keyboard shortcuts because they offer
the ability to work faster, letting users perform operations
without having to remove their hands from the keyboard.

“Since the Web?s early days, HTML has offered access keys, which
let you quickly navigate to a specific field by means of an ALT+key
combo. More recently, and more sophisticated, are hot keys, which
are specific to a single application and let users invoke any
function or perform any given procedure. You?ll probably want to
use both types of shortcuts in your web pages, so let?s quickly
look at access keys, then move on to implementing hot keys, first
by hand, then in a much easier way by using the Keyboard Shortcuts
JavaScript library, either directly or through jQuery.”

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