More Safari odds ’n’ ends

A mere six months after the first instalment, here’s another set of wishlists for Safari. Ahoy, Hyatt!

1. Confirm before closing a window with multiple tabs. This one’s essential and cannot wait.
2. Save state on quit. Opera and OmniWeb do it.
3. Bookmark groups of tabs. Open them all at once.
4. More than one row of toolbar tabs. But they must not move position vertically, as Word preference tabs do.
5. Enumerate links, Lynx- or indeed Links-style. Especially useful in endless form pulldowns. May require literal demarcations, as with INS: :INS, DEL: :DEL, ^ (for sup), CAPTION:.
6. Print preview with selectable areas and movable page breaks (if necessary, overriding print CSS).
7. Text-only view as good as Lynx’s. (I don’t find the Opera small-screen preview all that interesting save for its curiosity value.)
8. An API for plug-in auxiliary toolbars, as IE and Mozilla, among others, have.
9. Much better keyword metadata in bookmarks. With difficulty, in Moz I can find any bookmark I want based on the added description data I enter.
10. Valid-HTML bookmark export (as either lists, definition lists, or headings plus paragraphs or lists). You have no idea how tricky it is to unfuck Mozilla bookmark exports.
11. Toolbars at screen left, right, bottom, or top.
12. Actual compliance with User Agent Accessibility Guidelines, for which Apple has three separate reports in hand. Once the announced spoken interface finally ships, there will be no choice in the matter: You can’t be accessible in one way and inaccessible in others.
13. If character encoding fails, pop up a(n accessible) windoid with best guesses you can hit with one click. Some of the Chinese pages I bump into take minutes to fiddle with. In some cases I can’t really put my finger on, legacy encodings work better than Unicode; when no encoding is given, try these first. (I think Vietnamese is the example there.)
14. Improved support of orphan HTML elements and attributes, including table caption/summary, and fieldset, legend, and optgroup in forms.
15. Be the first-ever browser to actually support col(group).
16. Table tfoot prints across pages if and only if the table does.
17. I have a note here reading “modulariz WCAG.” I assume this means if WCAG is modularized, do not hesitate to support the easier modules first.
18. Let us type a bookmark name, as IE for Macintosh does. Mozilla developers think this is the stupidest thing they every heard, but if I remember Surfin’ Safari as “hyatt” and Dive into Mark as “pilgrim,” I should be able to type that – because, in IE, I already can. ¶ Meanwhile, fix the error that typing an URL that had already been visited matches very long strings at that URL and not simply the domain name.
19. Support XFN natively, somehow.
20. Type-ahead find.
21. Simply license the Schubert-It PDF plugin. Add some keyboard navigation and make it work better with tagged PDFs, but the thing’s already 80% mature. (Didn’t a one-hit-wonder band put out an album with that name?)
22. Steppable history, like Photoshop. It’s a pain in the arse to find a page you saw two days ago. The Mozilla method is excruciating. Save little thumbnails of the page as we browse and it becomes easier. Let us move item-by-item through the browser history.
23. ATSUI and selectable hung punctuation. But note that OmniWeb and especially Opera get these horribly wrong (screenshots later). ¶ Also, an Adobe Type Manager–esque feature: Choice of preserving character shapes or line heights, as with any usage of Zapfino.
24. Read type="" and hreflang="" in links and warn us when a link is in an unexpected type (as PDF) or language (as Chinese).
25. Make :focus work. I admit I am not hugely certain how to do it. I use it here and there (as with the book homepage). The combination of :focus:hover is even more obscure. In principle, these can be used to make keyboard navigation easier to follow, but how do you really make that work?
26. Speaking of which, it should be possible to move by keyboard from and between major structural components – heading to heading, list item to list item, paragraph to paragraph, within tables, and, for pages that use lots of iframes, (i)frame to (i)frame.
27. The equivalent of Moz’s Use Style menu. That would make for a useful windoid, actually.
28. This one’s good for a laugh: Build in contracted Braille output and thereby support the braille media type.
29. Bookmark anything with an id attribute, as has been much discussed lately. Frankly, the documents I write are the test case.
30. A scrapbook, just like IE 5’s (and in fact, an import/export function for IE 5 scrapbook entries). It’s unimaginably useful and I foresee using IE 5 yea unto OS XI just for that purpose.
31. Don’t suppose we could get object to work correctly?
32. Whitespace handling in combined block/inline elements like ins and del can be unpredictable (also inside button and iframe).

When the spoken interface is publicly available, I’m sure I’ll have a third instalment.