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copied!<p>Shortcuts in webapps are a good idea for your power users, but there's not nearly as much agreement on them as there is on desktop app shortcuts. For desktop apps, the ctrl key standards are essentially universal:</p> <ul> <li>z (undo)</li> <li>y (redo)</li> <li>s (save)</li> <li>a (select all)</li> <li>x (cut)</li> <li>c (copy)</li> <li>v (paste) </li> <li>p (print)</li> <li>o (open)</li> <li>n (new item)</li> </ul> <p><kbd>Ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>q</kbd> for quit and <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>w</kbd> for close window are almost universal, too; for mail clients, <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>r</kbd> and <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>f</kbd> are pretty universal for reply and forward, and <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>enter</kbd> is send; and for browsers, <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>r</kbd> is universally reload. There are also some F-keys that are pretty common - <kbd>F1 </kbd>for help, <kbd>F2</kbd> for rename, and <kbd>F5</kbd> for refresh.</p> <p>For webapps, however, there are a few issues. One is that the browser shell you're in has its own <kbd>ctrl</kbd> shortcuts, and focus isn't always exactly what you'd expect, so using ctrl-key that the browser expects (like <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>r</kbd>) may or may not pass the keyboard command through to the webapp's javascript (for example, depending on where your focus is when using Microsoft Outlook Web Access, <kbd>ctrl</kbd>-<kbd>r</kbd> will either reply to the message you're on, or reload the whole page). That's why many webapps use single-key shortcuts (which are not active when you're entering text, of course).</p> <p>The best practices in the area (in my opinion) seem to be coming from Google, where their shortcuts in gmail and reader are both intuitive and thorough. If you want a de facto standard for web application shortcut keys, that's probably a good place to start. You can bring up the <a href="http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?answer=69973&src=top5&lev=index" rel="nofollow noreferrer">shortcut keys list</a> in reader by pressing <kbd>?</kbd>. You could do worse than mirroring some of these (especially <kbd>j</kbd> for next item and <kbd>k</kbd> for previous), as they're starting to be pretty well known.</p>

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