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

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Nathan Heagy wrote:
> > 
> >  menu  n.  A list of available options.
> 
> If the definition of menu is too vague then couldn't we include <ul> and 
> <ol>? Especially since people make dynamic menus with these right now.

<ul> is an unordered list of items.
<ol> is an ordered list of items.
<dl> is an unordered list of name-value tuples.
<menu> is an unordered list of available command options.

They seem separate to me, I'm not sure we need to merge them further.


> However, imho ideally the menubar would be powerful enough to turn into 
> something like MS Office 12's ribbon. When I consider how that might 
> look in html I think that ultaflexible menus within menus would work 
> nicely.

As I understand it the two key things about the Ribbon are that effects 
are instantly previewed (requires an "onmouseover"/"onmouseout" set of 
events on all commands, though not limited to mice of course) and the fact 
that the ribbon is context sensitive (not hard just by showing/hiding 
commands on the fly). I haven't seen it first hand though so I may be 
mistaken.

It seems that it should be possible to implement that kind of UI with 
almost any toolbar-like solution that we come up with.

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