On Aug 7, 2007, at 9:10 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Matthew Thomas wrote:
...
Given that, I approve of giving menus and submenus a "disabled"
attribute that would make all their descendant items unavailable
without forgetting the erstwhile availability of individual
descendant items. This attribute would relieve applications from
having to remember the particular subset of descendant items that
were previously available, during those occasions when they are all
temporarily being made unavailable (for example, a "Format" menu
while focus is temporarily in a plain-text field secondary to the
main rich-text area).
The idea of the current mechanism, though, is that you can have those
same menu items also be a toolbar elsewhere (say), so you'd want to
disable the buttons anyway. Wouldn't it be better to have the menus
automatically disable submenu titles when appropriate?
It would be good for UAs to dim menu/submenu titles whenever all their
items are disabled, if that's the platform UI convention (and perhaps
even if it isn't). However, that's orthogonal to my suggestion.
I'm suggesting that since it is common for entire menus -- or toolbars
-- to be temporarily irrelevant, such as when focus is in a field or
pane where they do not apply, there should be a disabled= attribute for
disabling an entire <menu>. When this attribute is present, all the
<menu>'s items should be disabled, regardless of their individual
disabled= attributes; when the <menu>'s disabled= attribute is removed,
the disabled= attributes of the individual items should retake effect.
This would save authors a lot of work that they might otherwise not
bother with, thereby making their interfaces more responsive.
I do not think "but the menu items might be duplicated in a toolbar" is
a strong counterargument. If the temporarily-irrelevant items are a
subset of the items a toolbar, then yes, they will need disabling
individually. But often it will be the entire toolbar that needs
disabling, or the menu will not have equivalent items in a toolbar, or
-- even more common in Web apps -- the toolbar will not have equivalent
items in a menu.
(Note that the Mac OS X guidelines seem to no longer have the quote you
give above.)
...
Yes, they now say the opposite! I think that's a mistake, but in any
case, that doesn't affect my suggestion. It would still be useful to
make an entire menu disabled even if the platform UI convention is for
disabled menu titles to look enabled.
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
