Re: Panel is very broken, please revert.

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> > Feel free to blame me for this choice.  I am not sure what a better way
> > would be, drawing a focus line around the whole thing seems even
> > uglier and certainly a bit weird.  We don't have a good convention for
> > indicating when focus is in a container but not in a specific child, it
> > seems to me, so prelighting seemed at least like something that would
> > get noticed ;-)
> 
> I'm a total ignoramous about the technical issues involved here...
> 
> But another solution that might work is to block the pre-lighting when
> its a panel applet that has been focused (as opposed to the actual panel
> itself). I don't mind if the panel itself prelights if the actual panel
> has been click on. Actually, its good feedback since it lets users know
> that they've clicked in a blank spot (esp. since *ahem* certain window
> list applets have large areas that look blank ;-)

I agree with Calum that the behavior you complain about doesn't sound
like
what we would "expect".  I think that the problem is not with using
prelighting as a means of indicating Panel focus (i.e. panel container
has focus), but with the transient focus behavior in which the panel
container appears to receive and lose focus quickly (flashing).

It sounds to me as though the brokenness is in the focus-in/focus-out
itself, not the way we are indicating it.  I would expect that when
interacting with any panel applet, the (keyboard) focus would be given
to the applet or an object within it, and that only when the panel had
been
explicitly given focus would the outer panel be prelit.

As I understand it the means of explicitly assigning focus are either
by clicking on the panel (but not a focussable applet/child of the
panel), or by navigating to it via the keyboard command for assigning
focus to a panel/dock thingy, or by "jumping out" from keyboard focus
on a child (control-TAB I believe, sorry I don't have the spec in front
of me).

If the focus jumps in and out while using a panel app that's bad for 
accessibility too, from the point of view of any kind of assistive
technology that's doing focus tracking; and it's certainly very ugly,
so I think we would hope for a fix pre-2.0... just removing the concept
of panel focus is not a good option since it would block panel
accessibility.

regards,

Bill


> I think that would solve most of the issues detailed in my previous
> message.
> 
> -Seth
> 
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