[whatwg] Suggestion for Menus in Web Forms 2.0

[Matthew Thomas]

On 10 Aug, 2004, at 1:15 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Matthew Thomas wrote:
>>
>> On 9 Aug, 2004, at 8:40 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
>>> The problem is in the case where you _don't_ want it visible in 
>>> downlevel UAs.
>>
>> In which case you can use CSS to hide it.
>
> CSS can be disabled. Or not supported at all. It generally is not a
> solution to legacy fallback.

Er, really? So in HTML5, what do you propose will be the recommended 
way of making these controls invisible in downlevel UAs?
*   <output>
*   <button>
*   <select>
*   <textarea>

I don't see any way of hiding them in either HTML4 or WF2. If the 
answer is "without CSS, you can't", why shouldn't that be true for 
<menu> as well?

I appreciate that CSS isn't an ideal degradation mechanism, but then 
making something invisible is an odd sort of degradation for an 
interactive element to begin with.

> ...
>> Why on earth would you want to hide a menu? It's a menu. If none of 
>> its items apply to the current context, a menu should appear 
>> inactive, not hidden. Dynamically hiding and showing entire menus 
>> would make the interface unnecessarily unstable.
>
> We're talking about the menu part of a menu bar here, not the menu bar
> itself.

Ahh, I think I see the problem: I think you may have misread my 
proposal. <menutitle> is part of the <menu>.

       <menu id="fm">
        <menutitle>File</menutitle>
        <itemgroup>
         <li command="NewRecord">New</li>
         <li command="OpenRecord">Open&#8230;</li>
        </itemgroup>
        <itemgroup>
         <li command="ExportRecord">Export as Text</li>
         <li command="RenameRecord">Rename&#8230;</li>
         <li command="DeleteRecord">Delete</li>
        </itemgroup>
        <li command="SaveAndClose">Close</li>
       </menu>

> ...
> I believe I gave an example that shows why you are wrong in my last
> e-mail. Basically, there are two ways of showing the label; with and
> without attributes.
> ...

Again, I don't see why you are introducing multiple syntaxes to make 
menus degrade to either visible or invisible without CSS, while not 
doing the same for the Web Forms controls. If anything, it seems to me 
that hiding the latter (use case: hiding the toolbar buttons for an 
HTML editing area that degrades to a plain text editing area in 
downlevel browsers) would be useful more often than hiding the former.

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/