Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
...
I think we may be venturing into "no practical solution for the
platforms some user agents are running on" territory again.
This would be unfortunate. It is very clear that there is a need for
Web applications to be able to provide context-sensitive commands.
Windows Live Local (formely MSN Virtual Earth) provides a context menu
on its maps, and it makes a lot of sense.
Then that's very poor design on their part. Since that menu opens on
mouseup, so it wouldn't interfere with a drag, they could just as easily
require a normal click to open the menu rather than a right-click.
There are often instances where different actions for left and right
click are desirable. The fact that context menus are available as part
of every widely use GUI framework, and that they are universally used in
desktop applications, suggests that they are a very desirable feature
(although they're admittedly not used by all novice users). Whilst it
should never be possible to disable the UA context menu and submenus
(especially of context menus) are a poor idea, some way of specifying
author-provided context menus would still be a useful feature.
