RE: onmouseover, onfocus, onclick

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> > Ideally I would trigger menu appearance or disappearance from
> > onclick. Since onclick events occur when a focused item is
> > selected
>
> No.  Ideally, if popup menus are essential to successful web
> navigation, rather than a way of showing off, you should campaign
> for a popup menu style, that could be applied to lists, in the next
> version of CSS.

Yes, <menu> and <dir> are now deprecated, but could with some better
rendering have been very useful in these cases. I was talking from
the point of view of how people designing web pages should deal with
the task of producing popup menus, and from that point of view a new
popup menu style would probably make things get worse before they get
better, but in the long term be great from the point of view of both
being able to make accessible pages, and code popup menus more
easily.

Something like the following would be great:

<menu style="menu-style: shown;">
 <li id="cat1">Category 1
  <menu style="menu-style: popup;" parent="cat1">
   <li>Subcategory 1</li>
   <li>Subcategory 2</li>
  </menu>
 </li>
</menu>

As to whether popup menus are necessary or not, I don't think they
are ever completely necessary, but when used well they can increase
usability and therefore accessibility in it's widest sense - that is
it makes a site more usable to a group of users. However while there
are problems with them being accessed by some other groups -
including those groups which are the main focus of this list, and
since I don't think any group would find the alternatives impossible
to use I would avoid them.

Unfortunately for those of us who earn a living my writing web
pages/sites/applications pop up menus are impressive to clients, and
also likely to increase the ease-of-use for those clients (hence to
their mind you have made the site better in practical as well as
aesthetic terms). There are quite a few of us who work to make our
sites accessible as an additional requirement that we personally add
to the spec we get from our clients. For those of us in this position
finding a way to make popup menus today, with current technology,
accessible is our only option.

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Received on Friday, 16 February 2001 04:52:03 UTC