PATCH: webshortcuts

[Germain Garand]

Le Mardi 11 Octobre 2005 07:04, Dawit Alemayehu a écrit :
> On Monday 10 October 2005 08:44, Germain Garand wrote:
> > On the other hand, the colon is a very efficient visual cue for
> > separating the theme from the predicate (which itself will often contains
> > spaces).
>
> Visual cues are useless for something that stays half a second. Do you type
> a search text so big that you cannot easily distinguish it from the keyword
> ??

What I mean is 'syntactical', not so much visual.

There's no more reasons to type 

    "gg some information" 

rather than 

    "some information gg"

Shortcut and keywords are on the same plan.
Whereas

	"gg: some information"

is a perfectly logical and clean theme/predicate sentence.
Much easier to learn for the casual user.

When you see the lack of popularity of the feature in Mozilla browsers when 
compared to Konqueror, you think this might explain things.

But hey, if usability experts think this is OK, I'll pass.

There is also a broader scope problem:
Those shortcuts are not limited to Konqueror's location bar, they work also in 
the Alt+F2 command line... 

With space we are conflicting with the whole path.

Try "php someFunction" in alt+F2 and you've got a perfect example of the  
silently failing query you sought to avoid...

> > So unless you introduce a similarly strong cue, I think this pretty much
> > means killing the feature for new users, and making it awkward or
> > difficult to setup for others.
>
>  How ? Typing "kde KHTML" makes it hard to separate the keyword from the
> search portion ??? 

you forgot this is not limited to one search keyword.

> We cannot use any reserved words for reasons I have 
> stated. Specially ':' since it is already used to specify opaque URLs, i.e.
> mailto:blah at blah.blah. Anyways, the easiest delimiter that makes a URL
> invalid 

So practically, you are saying we have no choice for the separator...
Point taken, but then there's hardly a need to argue.

It is just a necessary change, even if inferior usability wise.

But we could for instance use a change in the location bar's background color, 
or other visual cues, as we do for https URL, to at least inform the user 
that he is entering a special query mode, after he has typed a valid shortcut 
followed by separator.

> and it's already used elsewhere 
> which gives it even more appeal. You can also set it today in KDE and see
> how it works out.

I have. It really doesn't cut it for me. See above.

> Anyways, the hardest thing that kills this feature is not what delimiter is
> used, but how to expose them to the regular users out there. I created the
> feature and I only remember a handful of the shortcuts because I use them
> on a regular basis. I am sure the are many useful ones in there, but... you
> get the point.

Sure. That's another area where *some kind* of highlight mechanism for 
shortcuts could help, IMO.

Greetings,
Germain