[whatwg] Suggestion for Menus in Web Forms 2.0

On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Matthew Thomas wrote:
>
> To pick just three examples, HTML5 applications will not be able to 
> avoid that on some platforms there will be a menu bar

I'm not sure what you mean here. Why would they want to avoid it? Quite 
the opposite, they would want to go ahead and replace it, just like any 
first-class citizen in the GUI system.


> they will not be able to control their taskbar/Dock icon

Why not?

I haven't actually heard anyone request that they should be able to, so at 
the moment they indeed can't, but I don't see any fundamental reason why 
an HTML application shouldn't, once granted "first-class" rights by the 
user, be able to access the notification area of the system GUI, or be 
able to add menu items to their system menu on their icon, or whatever.


> and they will not be able to handle documents dragged to the 
> application's icon.

Again, why not? We could easily add support for this if there was demand.

At the moment, though, I haven't heard much demand for this kind of thing.


> How strongly the Web Apps spec suggests particular visual presentation 
> is suggested for <menu> probably depends on how strongly the What-WG 
> specs suggest particular visual presentation for controls in general. I 
> don't think Ian has said anything about that yet.

HTML markup should be presentation-independent. The <canvas> element is 
the only thing close to an exception that I can think of. (It's just 
slightly more presentational than <img>.)

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

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 15:39:18 UTC