[whatwg] Menus, fallback, and backwards compatibility: ideas wanted

Tue Dec 6 16:49:17 PST 2005

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> 
> I wouldn't mind requiring li for content other than cmd, since we 
> already use it within ul for menus, and other than reduced markup, I see 
> no other benefit in leaving it out.

Reduced markup is quite an important goal. Another important goal is being 
able to get just the right kind of fallback. Most toolbars these days 
don't have bullets before every command button. :-)

> Earlier, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > 1. Providing a menu bar for the entire window (or application, on Mac), so
> > that the application can be a native-like application. This, IMHO, is    out
> > of scope for HTML5 and should maybe be revisited in HTML6 by    whoever does
> > the work on taking HTML out of the browser, if that ever    happens.
> 
> I just had a thought that maybe this could be marked up by including the
> <menu> within the <head> element, since the content of the head element
> contains metadata applying to the whole document, and an application menu bar
> applies to the whole application, it makes sense for such a menu to be marked
> up like that.  However, this would only be possible in XHTML documents.

Yeah, in HTML it would force the <body> to open. An option for XHTML, 
indeed.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'