Re: [whatwg] <menu> and friends

On Fri, 28 Dec 2012, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> 
> 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'm happy to give guidance that happens to match what the browser vendors 
want to do anyway, but I don't think it makes sense to make a page-
undetectable UI detail like this a conformance requirement.


> 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?

As a user, I would hate that. But if you as a browser vendor are telling 
me as a spec writer that this is what would be needed to convince authors 
to not use <div>s for context menus, then yes.

As a user, what I would like to be the behaviour, without the ability for 
the author to override it, is for the context menu to have the author's 
context menu items plus the context-sensitive items that cannot be 
accessed via the regular menus (e.g. Inspect Element, View Image, Copy 
Link Location, that kind of thing).


> 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.

I'm very skeptical about adding any kind of control here before we have 
broader implementation experience. Once we do, then it will be revisited 
anyway, since we have this bug on file:

   https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12999

(I regularly reopen all the bugs marked LATER and go through them again.)


> 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.

Aren't those items accessible from the main menu?

What items are there that it sometimes makes sense to expose but 
othertimes does not make sense to expose?

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

Received on Saturday, 29 December 2012 07:08:17 UTC