[whatwg] Looking at menus in HTML5...

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Wed Aug 8 01:10:56 PDT 2007


On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> > > 
> > > So where this context menu feature request comes from?
> > 
> > It's a frequent request from Web app developers.
> 
> Do you have any links for them?

Not off-hand. You can probably find them in the archives.


> > I gave two earlier; Google Docs and Spreadsheets is another. Context 
> > menus that are "non-styleable" are used in almost all desktop 
> > applications, so any Web analogue to desktop applications could well 
> > want to use one. We frequently get requests for how to do this.
> 
> Question was: "Do you have any examples of exisiting web applications 
> that will benefit *significantly* from having that flat puristic context 
> menus?"

I posit that the examples I gave are applications that would benefit 
significantly. We may disagree on what is significant, of course, that is 
subjective.


> Google Maps uses two types of context menus/panels:
> http://www.terrainformatica.com/w3/gmap.jpg

The top one in that picture is not a context menu.


> So you say that if one of it will be implemented as <select type="menu"> 
> then this will significantly improve quality of this application or 
> solve many problems. Sounds a bit artificial, isn't it?

Implementing the bottom as a <menu type="context"> would significantly 
improve the user experience, yes.


> And here is an example of menu used in Google Spreadsheet 
> http://www.terrainformatica.com/w3/gcalc.jpg
> 
> So you say that Google Spreadsheet will use that plain text menus?

Again, we are talking about context menus here, not about drop-down menus. 
I agree that drop-down menus and menu buttons are not addressed by the 
current draft, and I imagine we'll address those in a future version.


> And where these 80% came from? If three applications you provided will 
> not benefit from proposed solution?

I disagree with the premise of your question.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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