Re: SELECT structures with lots of OPTIONs

On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Daniel Dardailler wrote:

> 
> I agree with Megazone (sorry I lost your real name) that his proposal
> is superior as it allows for nesting and sharing of options.
> 
> What I don't really get in Dave's or Al's proposal is if the focus is
> just simplicity so that the browser can implement it more easily, or
> because browser can ignore it altogether ?
> 
> It looks to me that even Dave's proposal of 
> <!ELEMENT optgroup O O (option+)>
> woudl require visual browser to do something.

To support arbitrarily nested menus, you can change the OPTGROUP
element to act as a container, e.g.

	<!EMPTY select - - (optgroup|option)+>
	<!ELEMENT optgroup - - (optgroup|option)+>
	<!ELEMENT option - O EMPTY>

This change means that authors are required to supply the end tag
for OPTGROUP.

I don't understand Daniel's last comment. Existing visual browsers
happily ignore the OPTGROUP elements. New versions of these browsers
could continue with the same treatment, but we would recommend that
they showed the menu structure.

NOTE not all user interfaces support slide-right nested menus. 
This may cause sufficient problems to make it unwise to recommend
hierarchically nested select menus. 

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Tuesday, 14 October 1997 12:59:41 UTC