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

[Nathan Heagy]

I wasn't actually suggesting <li> be merged with <menu>, just that your
definition of menu as "A list of available options" was too broad to be
the criteria for defining <menu>.


The feature of ribbon I was specifically thinking of was the way chunks
collapse when space isn't available. The ribbon is segmented into
smaller toolbars such as "arrange". When the window is narrow and it
can't display all the chunks some of them collapse into a single menu. 

It doesn't make sense for a <menubar> to behave like a menu based on
available space but if everything is a <menu> it's logical.

More information on this aspect of ribbon here: 
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/18/482233.aspx

N




-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian at hixie.ch] 
Sent: December 7, 2005 6:26 PM
To: Nathan Heagy
Cc: whatwg at whatwg.org
Subject: RE: [whatwg] Menus, fallback, and backwards compatibility:
ideas wanted

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
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