Re: [whatwg] <menu> and friends

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Dec 2012, Jonas Sicking wrote:

[rearranging the thread a bit here]

>> While mean that authors still wouldn't have 100% control over the UX,
>> they would have dramatically more control than as the proposal stands
>> now, heavily tipping the scale towards option B.
>
> The proposal as it stands now is that the browsers can show only the
> page's context menu, only the user agent's context menu, or anything in
> between. I don't think it's "heavily tipped" in either direction.

I don't think it's a good solution to leave it undefined if
all/none/some of the UA menuitems are displayed by default. While it
on an API level won't break anything, authors consider as "breaking" a
lot more things than APIs not behaving as expected.

I.e. if some UAs are rendering all items by default and some render
none, that will mean that authors will consider the feature broken in
some UAs. It'll also mean that authors are having the same lack of
control as I talked about meaning that the incentives are for option A
still.

>> As long as that remains the case we are giving authors two options:
>>
>> A) Use "pile of <div>s" to render context menu and get full control over
>> what is rendered in the context menu.
>>
>> B) Use <menu> to create a more accessible menu, but accept that they
>> will always be listed together with a list of UA items.
>
> Browsers don't _have_ to show their items with the contextmenu="" menu. If
> the two choices above are the only choices, then it seems to me that
> browsers should just not include their menu in the contextmenu="" menu.

So are you proposing that the default should be that no UA menu
options are displayed. I.e. the default being as if nodefault was set?
I guess I could live with that as long as there was a way for the page
to opt in to displaying items. It would allow adding more finegrained
control over which categories of menu items are turned backed on which
could be neat.

>> All of this makes me think that in very many cases authors will choose
>> option A above.
>
> In that case, when would it make sense for the browser to ever include the
> default menu items? i.e. why not make "nodefault" the default?

Note that I didn't say "always" but "many cases". I do think it's the
case that in many cases displaying the UA menuitems is desirable. A
good example of this is menu items that control access to the
clipboard since that's something that webpages can't implement
themselves. Most browsers do not permit reading and writing to the
clipboard arbitrarily.

But maybe starting simple and making "nodefault" the default behavior
might not be a bad idea. However I think it's something that should be
defined by spec as to make it consistent across UAs.

/ Jonas

Received on Saturday, 29 December 2012 05:12:41 UTC