[whatwg] Suggestion for Menus in Web Forms 2.0
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Wed Aug 25 16:30:01 PDT 2004
On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, Matthew Thomas 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>
Displaying the contents of <output> is the fallback behaviour we want.
> * <button>
New <button> types will fallback to submit buttons (in conformant UAs)
which is what we want, since it allows authors to implement the behaviour
on the server side, as in this demo:
http://www.whatwg.org/demos/repeat-01/
> * <select>
> * <textarea>
Not sure what you are referring to here, these aren't new in HTML5.
> 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?
With <menu> you can chose if you want the fallback behaviour to be "show
something" or "show nothing", since both use cases make sense.
> 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.
Not if that element wouldn't do anything useful anyway. For example, you
wouldn't want a context menu to degrade to something visible, you would
just not have the context menu feature.
> > > 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…</li>
> </itemgroup>
> <itemgroup>
> <li command="ExportRecord">Export as Text</li>
> <li command="RenameRecord">Rename…</li>
> <li command="DeleteRecord">Delete</li>
> </itemgroup>
> <li command="SaveAndClose">Close</li>
> </menu>
No, I had understood that. I don't see how my reaction was wrong. The
problem with the above is that you want to hide the <menu> while it isn't
shown. If the <menutitle> is a child, then it will be hidden too.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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