Re: [Pythoncard-users] clearing up tab order in resourceEditor

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Alex Tweedly wrote on 04/04/2005 03:42:32 PM:

> I think it's important to NEVER have focusable components that can't
> be reached by TAB order. The idea of a field that needs to be 
> reachable but can be reached ONLY by mouse movement strikes me as 
> being wrong. 

Well, I suppose that's a reasonable position, assuming your application is 
attempting to reach the widest possible audience. But what if your 
application is for a very small set of users, or even one end user, such 
as the owner of a small business?

My experience doing custom FileMaker solutions tells me that some 
customers want only specific fields in the tab order, so as to streamline 
data entry, and FileMaker does support omitting fields from the tab order. 
The most egregious example in my experience was a loan application form 
with dozens of obscure fields that were usually not used. The loan officer 
wanted the option of editing those other fields, but didn't want to have 
to tab through them constantly. I suppose I could have made him switch to 
a different layout, but he wouldn't have been happy with that.

Sometimes having a toolset enforce a user-interface convention/ideology 
makes sense, but I'm not sure it makes sense in the case of tab order.