[whatwg] <menu> and friends

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > 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").
> 
> Sure, but this is purely academic--

I was just disagreeing with the statement "Not even the proposal from 
Ian".


> unless browsers actually do this.

Firefox does, though its interface for it is somewhat arcane 
(about:config tweaking), right?


Anyway, I don't really understand what we're arguing here. It's not 
generally controversial that we should take care in adding new features. 
For this one, we have one browser that implements something somewhat like 
what the spec now has, and that's it. We have a concern (that some 
browsers will avoid the feature entirely if the UA shows the items in 
addition to the default items), but we don't have much data to support 
this, and we have no data exploring whether any of the various mitigating 
ideas (submenu, only including critical UA items, shift key to show the 
original menu, never showing the original menu) satisfy authors or users 
sufficiently to avoid having to add more syntax.

Until we have more data, not doing anything in the spec is the right move.

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