> So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting E

> So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting ENTER or SPACE might perform an action they really aren't expecting, and didn't want. perhaps you should design the interface so that the button they get to after the text box does not perform an irreversible action. After typing my reply in the other thread, I read far enough down the page to get to this entry, and I have to say I agree 100% with what you've said here. The fact that pressing [TAB, space] sends the email irreversibly is dangerous, and can pretty easily happen by accident when typing quickly. Having said that, the behavior of TAB moving between form elements is a long standing behavior. Many "power users" use it to great effect, but it's discoverability is very poor. The solution is a tough compromise though. In Gmail, many users rely on the [TAB, space] sequence to send email. I do the same thing on Hacker News. When I finish my comment, I use [TAB, space] to submit my comment. The people who write the software are loath to give that up. My feeling is that within the rich text editing area of an email message, TAB ought to insert a tab character, but I'm not sure how difficult that is. The TAB keypress is handled by the browser, so if the Gmail devs were to go through the trouble of trapping TAB and inserting the tab character in to the text area, they'd be breaking the expected behavior of the web browser. In that way, this solution creates another problem. Which one is "right"? It's a bit of a paradox. If nothing else, I hope this helps shed some light on why these design decisions aren't always as straight forward as they seem.