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

[Anne van Kesteren]

Quoting Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>:
> Matthew has pretty much convinced me that trying to grandfather the
> current DHTML menu syntaxes into the new markup is not worth it, so we
> can ignore that requirement.

<http://alistapart.com/articles/dropdowns> is what can be done today 
with quite
good markup. Only nested lists suck a bit as the html:a and html:ul are
siblings. (One inline-level and on block-level.) Replacing html:ul with
html:menu and it would be a "real" menu.


How is:

>   <p>
>    <menubar>
>     <label for="x"> Action... </label>
>     <select id="x" onchange="...">
>      ...
>     </select>
>    </menubar>
>   </p>
>
> Good back-compat story, but far too heavy on the markup. Suboptimal
> element name <menubar>, with no obvious alternatives.

... much different from:

>  <menu label="Action">
>   Action...
>   <select onchange="...">
>    ...
>   </select>
>  </menu>

It seems the html:p element suddenly wasn't necessary anymore, but 
otherwise...
(html:label element versus label attribute.) These seem to be the better
options.

Or give the option element a boolean attribute "label"...

I wonder though how you'd handle nested dropdown menu's inside a html:select
element etc. Perhaps with optgroup etc. But with no better styling mechanism
for form controls this idea is never going to make it. From that perspective
using html:menu with html:li etc. is much better I guess.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>