[whatwg] Thoughts on Context and Popup Menus for Web Applications 1.0

[Lachlan Hunt]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> 
>>We should not give authors the power to override the UAs context menu...
> 
> Indeed, any context menu concept introduced in WA1 would have to have an 
> "escape clause" to let UAs allow users to access the original menu.

Ok, that's good.

>>I'm not objecting to having elements specifically for menus, as long as 
>>their names are semantic (unlike <popup> which also suggests its 
>>presentation), I object to the method you have proposed for accessing 
>>the menu.  The method should not be defined like that, but should be 
>>left to UA and the presentation (CSS) and sometimes behavour 
>>(JavaScript) layers to determine.
> 
> Conceptually you have a document fragment and a list of commands that 
> apply to that fragment. It seems that linking those two parts would be a 
> markup-level problem. Context menus make sense on any interactive media, 
> not just on visual media.

Yes, I agree.  Context menus make sense in any media, but they're not 
always going to "popup" in all media, which is what my point was.  Popup 
only makes sense in visual and interactive media like screen, handheld 
and tty.  But, it makes no sense for aural, braille or even print media 
to have popups, though, in each of them, it may still make sense for the 
menu to be accessible.

However, now that I've had another look at the draft, I like the idea of 
the context-menu attribute referring to a <menu> element.  I had thought 
there was once <popup> element in the draft, but it seems to have either 
gone, or I'm mistaken and had only read it in e-mails – I can't 
remember.  Either way, it's starting to look good, and I have no further 
objections to for context menus yet.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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