focus (was Re: Bug 435 - accents only work after font change)


Subject: focus (was Re: Bug 435 - accents only work after font change)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Mar 24 2000 - 01:07:38 CST


Aaron,

A quick response for you.

1. The reason we do keyboard handling at the toplevel window is to allow
the configurable keybinding mechanism to work. Keystrokes may come in for
command-key accelerators and/or for typing into the document. The important
thing is to have all of the keyboard events wind up in one central place for
processing. Doing so in XAP code is ideal, because the resulting XP
mechanism will then be available for any application using our framework.

If you wind up deciding to move focus to one of the child widgets, then
you'll need to make sure that attempts to send focus elsewhere inside the
top-level container are forwarded appropriately.

2. However, we definitely *do* need to do a better job of integrating what
we do with platform-specific notions of focus, even if we just use the
normal focus mechanisms as a filtering cue for simulating the desired
behavior. For example,

  - we should know when to claim and give up the focus (and then do so)
  - we should ignore keyboard events when we *don't* have the focus
  - we shouldn't draw selections or blink the cursor then either

There are probably more details I'm forgetting, but I wanted to confirm that
this *is* a real problem that could use a good solution. If you'd like to
team up with folks on the various platforms to spec what the desired focus
*behavior* should be, that'll take care of the hardest part.

By comparison, once you've got those details spec-ed out, getting that
behavior implemented shouldn't be that bad.

Paul



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