[whatwg] Status bars and progress indicators

[Lachlan Hunt]

Matthew Raymond wrote:
>    (Personally, I don't understand why they won't let programs turn off 
> the status bar when the user still can. You could simply ask the user to 
> hide the status bar before starting the program. Does Microsoft block 
> detection of whether or not the status bar is hidden, by the way? If so, 
> the application could simply refuse to run unless the user disables the 
> status bar.)

An application *must not* have any control over, or be able to force the 
user into changing the UAs application interface.  If a user wants to 
have a status bar, the web application *must not* be able to alter that 
decision in any way.  In general, a web application *must not* have any 
control over anything outside of the viewport.  If they did, then as a 
user, I would disable any feature that allowed them to do so.  If that 
broke their application, so that it refused to run because of it, then 
it has failed to degrade gracefully, and violates accessibility guidelines.

   The same applies to menus, toolbars, window resizing, context menus, 
etc. which have previously been able to be disabled/removed by 
JavaScript, but thankfully, modern browsers can now prevent authors 
doing that.  Lets not give back these abilities to the author!

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