[whatwg] <menu> and friends

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Jan 4 16:56:37 PST 2013


On Fri, 4 Jan 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> >
> > Gah, strongly agree.  Simple example - I use "Back" constantly in the 
> > context menu, and would be really pissed if pages could easily kill 
> > that. [...]
> 
> Can you elaborate on what you mean by "if" above. It's already the case 
> that pages can in all popular browsers.
> 
> Please note that none of the proposals here remove that option. Not even 
> the proposal from Ian.

The spec allows the browser to remove that option. ("User agents may 
provide means for bypassing the context menu processing model, ensuring 
that the user can always access the UA's default context menus") It even 
gives an example of how to do it ("For example, the user agent could 
handle right-clicks that have the Shift key depressed in such a way that 
it does not fire the contextmenu event and instead always shows the 
default context menu").


> > On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 12:54 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> 
> > wrote:
> >> What I was saying as a browser vendor is that I don't think that 
> >> authors are going to use this feature unless it provide the ability 
> >> to replace the existing context menu. Or at least almost entirely 
> >> replace it.
> >
> > I don't think I can agree with this.  This argument would be more 
> > believable if authors currently used pile-of-divs for context menus a 
> > lot, but I only rarely actually see it.  I think this is because it's 
> > just plain *hard* to do it even half-decently.  The extreme ease with 
> > which authors will be able to create high-quality context menus with 
> > <menu> will, I think, override a lot of the concerns.
> 
> I feel that I do see this quite often. maps.google.com, Google docs, and 
> Zimbra are three examples off the top of my head that I spend a lot of 
> time with.

I agree with Jonas here. Big apps definitely do this. It's not something 
small apps do because it's such a high cost, as Tab says, but for sites 
that can afford to pay the cost, they are paying it today.

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



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