[whatwg] Exposing spelling/grammar suggestions in contentEditable

Glenn Maynard glenn at zewt.org
Wed Dec 29 20:57:13 PST 2010


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Nils Dagsson Moskopp
<nils-dagsson-moskopp at dieweltistgarnichtso.net> wrote:
> Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> schrieb am Thu, 30 Dec 2010 01:47:51 +0000
> (UTC):
>
>> I am skeptical about allowing Web pages decide what should be in the
>> context menu. Adding things is ok, but removing things leads to a
>> broken user experience. For example, as a user I frequently make use
>> of "view source", and I don't think it would be good for a page to be
>> able to remove that feature.

One possible UI: pushing options into a separate menu block.  For
example, XP's start menu does this; less-used items are hidden until
you click an arrow at the bottom of the list to expand the full menu.
This would allow sites to set up their own context menu items without
a lot of clutter, but disallow them from completely disabling the
existing one.

I'm not sure whether pages hinting whether to do this would be
meaningful, since context menu presentation varies wildly and the
desired hint may be different for each browser.  This may be better
left to browser extensions.

> For the record, crippling context menus is in the wild already: Youtube
> has no “save to disk” (or any other of the standard options) on a HTML5
> video, only „about HTML5“.

They seem to think that sabotaging the user's browser is a joke, too,
since there's a rickrolling "save video as" menu item.  Not funny.

I don't understand why most browsers honor preventDefault on
contextmenu and right-clicks by default.  Blatent abuse like this is
widespread, and one of the oldest, more obnoxious and most common
scripting abuses--alert("Right click is not allowed")--so it gets
turned off by users who know how.  But since it's on by default, many
sites try to use it--innocently, mostly--to override the context menu
for site features.  This means that whether you enable it or disable
it, some sites are broken, often with that nonsensical behavior of two
menus opening on top of each other.

This can't be prevented entirely, eg. blitting images and video into a
canvas will always break associated context menu items, but
fragmenting browser behavior so badly is a general, user-visible
problem.

-- 
Glenn Maynard



More information about the whatwg mailing list