- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 09:39:40 +1200
On 10/06/2004, at 3:57 AM, Jose Dinuncio wrote: > > El mi?, 09-06-2004 a las 09:33, Didier PH Martin escribi?: > ... >> Questions: >> A) How to define a menu bar? >> B) How to define a control bar? >> c) How to define a status bar? > ... > Why not just > > <hlayout> > > <hbox> > <menubar> > <menu title="F_ile"> > <option>Save</option> > ... > </menu> > </menubar> > </hbox> > ... Is this application supposed to appear inside a browser window? If so, the above won't make sense on those platforms where there is only one menu bar shown at a time (e.g. Mac OS X, KDE with "Current application's menu bar on the top of the screen" checked, and OpenStep), because the menu bar already contains the browser's menus. And even on those platforms where nested menu bars are possible, they would still be extremely error-prone -- people wanting to choose something from your app's "File" menu would often go to the browser's "File" menu by mistake. If Web Forms 2.0 is going to be an extension of HTML forms (as opposed to XUL or XAML), I think very few apps built on it would be complicated enough to benefit from a full-blown menu bar. (The HTML editor example above is wanted often enough, e.g. for Webmail, that it should be built into the browser anyway. That way people don't have to learn a different HTML editing UI for every site that wants to use one.) Menu-wise, I think these *would* be useful additions to HTML forms for Web apps: 1. A control for single pulldown menus that aren't in a menu bar. XHTML 2's NL element seems to be intended for implementation as a pulldown menu, but as far as I can see it's intended for hyperlinks rather than for commands that can act on previous user input. Some sites roll their own pulldown menus using HTML+CSS+JS; but they never get submenu behavior correct (submenus often disappear when you're moving diagonally towards the item you want), and browser differences occasionally make the menus completely unusable. (Sometimes the JavaScript doesn't work at all; other times a tiny gap is rendered between the menu title and the menu, and crossing the gap makes the menu disappear). Other sites use SELECT for this purpose, together with JavaScript, or an "OK" button, or both. This is rather unfortunate -- the title of the menu is inserted as the first "option", so the title incorrectly disappears when a command is chosen. 2. Some method of integration to allow Web apps to respond to the browser's Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All menu items and keyboard equivalents. These work automatically for text fields in any Web application; it would be great if apps could make them work for stocks, address book cards, message attachments, transactions, photos, and so on too. I'd add Undo and Redo to that list, but unfortunately IE6 doesn't have Undo and Redo menu items. -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2004 14:39:40 UTC