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

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Dec 9 12:38:17 PST 2005


On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
> How does all this menus stuff relate to the LINK element? I'm getting 
> the feeling that this might kill the best of what the LINK element has 
> to offer: ease of navigation through recognisability.

<link> has had ten years to prove itself. It failed. We should learn from 
this and not force ourselves to give it another ten years. :-)

<menu> is not really primarily for navigation (that's what <nav> is for). 
The main use case I'm considering is command menus, as seen in 
applications like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.


> So I feel that a definition of "menu" should promote the use of LINK. It 
> could do so by stating that "menu" (or perhaps only a subset, "menu 
> type=navigation") should get its contents from LINK elements. That way 
> web publishers wouldn't need to dupicate navigational links anymore and 
> user-agents could allow users to decide whether to present such menus 
> inline in accordance with the site's suggested presentation (CSS), or in 
> the sort of toolbar that current browsers offer for LINK.

I'm not really sure how this would work. Could you give a more concrete 
specification for your idea?

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



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