Re: Re: Re: Re: web-based application or desktop application?

[hardburn]

Trying to use keyboard navigation for web pages is painful at best.

I generally prefer my mouse's wheel for scrolling anyway, and movements honed by years of FPS and RTS gaming make me pretty quick with the mouse pointer :)

When filling in forms, most text boxes don't pose a problem, as the default tabbing order is usually correct. HTML does provide a way for the developer to specify a tab order, but I don't think it's used too often. Pull-down boxes may or may not pose a keyboarding problem--for common ones, like a place to fill in what state you live in, I can generally get there without a problem (I live in Wisconsin, which in alphabetical order is the second US state that starts with 'W', so pressing 'w' twice gets me there). I find checkboxes and radios are the biggest keyboarding issue.

[Rex(Wrecks)]

Point taken :)

An example of what I mean is gnats, I used to be working, coding, testing, and hence filing bugs. Everything I was doing was text based, and the only way I ever accessed gnats was via the command line interface, it was just much faster for me than having to use the web pages. Both gnats interfaces were equally clunky IMHO, but with the commandline I didn't have to mouse it, and I didn't need a windowing system on the machine (which was the case all to often).

gnats (good or bad you decide) is actually a good example here, its a case where the HTML interface is most used, but not the only way to do it. For the less computer literate it is an easy familiar HTML interface, and for those like me, it is just a few keystrokes to manipulate. That is the way I like applications, with options to do it the way I like :)