Re: [whatwg] <menuitem>: Issue reported by the web developers

On Wed, 26 Nov 2014, Sanjoy Pal wrote:
> 
> As per specification [1][2], <menuitem> should not have end tag, but few 
> websites uses <menuitem>Some markup</menuitem> which resulted in broken 
> sites[3][4].
> 
> Firefox allows <menuitem>Some markup</menuitem>. So, we are wondering if 
> specification can be modified to allow <menuitem>Some markup</menuitem> 
> for backward compatibility.

Do we know how many sites are affected?

As I see it there's basically three choices -- in my order of preference, 
they would be:

- break the sites: if there aren't many, and especially if they can be 
evangelised to avoid these mistakes, then we should just do that

- rename <menuitem> to something else, like <command>: this would be 
unfortunate, since the feedback from Mozilla a few years ago was that 
they'd rather have <menuitem> than <command>, and it would also mean some 
parser churn, which is always bad, but it would probably be reasonably 
safe to do if we can find a good replacement element name

- change <menuitem>'s semantics so that the label comes from the element's 
textContents instead of a label="" attribute (and charge the parser 
accordingly): not sure how compatible this would be; it has numerous 
disadvantages, too, like making people think they can put markup in the 
element (look at the Apple page for an example), which wouldn't work

There may be other options that aren't immediately coming to mind.

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

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2014 06:24:58 UTC