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

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Wed Dec 7 14:17:10 PST 2005


On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
> That's not a menu. It's a MENUBAR.

What's the difference?

I would argue that the following are all the same:

 * menubars
 * pull-down menus
 * drop-down menus
 * context menus
 * toolbars

They're just different presentations of the same underlying concept: 
lists of commands or options.

  menu  n.  A list of available options.

This is why I think it makes sense to use one menu to describe all of 
them.

Now, there is a small difference between context menus and the others in 
the list above in that context menus are irrelevant until activated on 
specific items, so we need a way to mark them. There's also a practical 
difference between <menu> as implemented today and <menu> as we want it to 
work (with natively implemented dynamic UI), so we need a way to mark 
those too. This is why I was thinking of an attribute on <menu>.

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



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