Why cant it follow the accessibility pref ? I wonder if this is not
done in mozilla itself actually ... it would be odd that their
accessibility depend on an hidden pref.

Actually, you can turn on caret browsing in Mozilla by pressing F7.

They don't seem to have much interest in adding a UI for it:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165362

...but they are about to add a confirmation thingy:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128025

Btw, wouldn't it make sense for this to be a global accessability pref
for the whole of GNOME - i.e. if someone wants caret browsing in ephy,
they probably want it in other read only text based apps.

Re:
>Why cant it follow the accessibility pref

I talked with calum about this, and he didn't think that really made
sense (paraphrasing, I'll cc him though for clarification). You might
want to have caret browsing without enabling all the xkb keyboard a11y
features. But piers is right a global pref for this and other a11y
related features would be preferable, but that all depends on more
apps using gtkmozembed, so for now we need something.

Your paraphrasing is correct, from what I remember of our conversation
six months ago :)  The suggestion is purely based on my experience
with Mozilla, though, where I've had caret browsing turned on for
months and never once found it obtrusive, but very useful on the
occasions I've needed it.

Perhaps anyone who's used it more extensively can suggest why we
*wouldn't* want it turned on all the time?

We can't turn it on unconditionally because caret browsing is buggy.
For example http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202157 "caret
mode: spacebar and pageDown/pageUp don't scroll as expected",
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205846 "caret eventually
gets stuck when trying to scroll with PageDown / PageUp keys".

Calum, i think the number of complaints when we did have this enabled 
by default suggests that this isn't a good idea. The main issue to me 
is that if i want to scroll a page with the keyboard, i click 
somewhere on the page and press the Up and Down keys to scroll. With 
caret browsing enabled, the page doesn't scroll until the cursor 
reaches the bottom of the page.

What is the main point of caret browsing? To be able to select text 
with the keyboard? Because you can do that anyway...

It's primarily an accessiblity feature-- without it, you can indeed
select text from the keyboard anyway, but you either have to set the
anchor point using the mouse (no use for accessibility) or by using
incremental search (not necessarily very efficient, and perhaps
impossible if it's just an image you're trying to copy).  And when you
do so, no text cursor is shown until you start making your selection,
which goes against the 508 requirement that focus must be clearly
shown at all times.

The bugs certainly sound like a good reason to make this optional at
least for now though.  (I'd be less inclined to say that interfering
with arrow up/down was a good enough reason on its own... how often do
you really have to scroll a webpage a line at a time from the
keyboard, rather than a page at a time?  Can't say I ever feel the
need myself :)

If you want to give it a keyboard shortcut, it should really go on a
menu rather than in a dialog.  So I'd maybe go for something like a
"View->Selection Caret" checkbox menu item (shortcut F7, for
consistency with Moz).

>how often do you really have to scroll a webpage a line at a time from
>the keyboard, rather than a page at a time? 

Well, i use it all the time :) This also applies to scrolling left and 
right. I think it'd be fine to have it as an option though, and aim
for a global GNOME preference (to cover all read-only documents such as 
Nautilus text viewer and GPDF) at some point down the line.

Can we at least hook up F7 to toggle caret browsing mode before the 
freeze?

gtkhtml2 now offers this feature too: see bug 123008

Created attachment 23121 [details] [review]
implementation

The patch implements an accellerator-only action (F7) which toggles
the mozilla pref.

Marco: Ok to commit?

Please commit, thanks. Christian please dont block on me with patches
adding features. It's a damn bad period for me so if you send me a
private mail about the patches you want to get in 1-2 days before the
freeze we will be sure to not fail to get them in (I noticed this one
accidentally ...)

Checked in.

IHMO we should close this and just follow what they does on yelp as we
have been doing

what is yelp doing again. My opinion on this is "Whatever makes calum 
and bill happy."

There is an accell. I'm cced on that bug if they add a pref or
something we will see what to do (maybe share or clone ..).