I apologize, the context made me think along the lines of Dvorak.
EDIT: Even so, most OSes now make it relatively easy to switch layouts based on country, so I feel as though my point still stands.
EDIT: Even so, most OSes now make it relatively easy to switch layouts based on country, so I feel as though my point still stands.
The problem is that the physical layout is unchanged, so you need to memorize the keys...
Nobody using Dvorak will want WASD as movement controls for a game for example, but they will most likely want to use the same keys, right?
The problem is, only the keyboard hardware knows where the keys are physically located. The OS knows the layout and could probably expose the QWERTY-equivalent keys, which would be sufficient for not-too-exotic keyboards, but I don't know if that is available to applications in a way that is sufficiently portable for browsers to expose it.
Chromium seems to expose this to Pepper plugins; here is the bug for making it an experimental js api: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=119362 Getting the lowlevel keycode is nonportable (I didn't find the implementation, but found switch cases and fallbacks if it doesn't exist). Conversion to a portable usb-hid-equivalent keycode is left as a stub in the patch that introduced the Pepper feature.