Author access to menu bar for commands

Problem statement / use cases

• With the proliferation of web applications, authors want to produce web applications that more and more reproduce the user experience of desktop applications
• For many classes of applications, developing with HTML and the surrounding technologies is easier to learn yet as effective as a thoroughly robust development environment
• The HTML5 draft already includes many ways to define commands using elements such as INPUT, BUTTON, MENU, etc; however, the HTML5 does not yet define a method to use these menus of commands in the menu bar of an HTML5 UA

Proposed solutions

Provide new markup for menu bar menus

Using the existing facilities in the HTML5 draft extend the concept of commands and menus to allow authors to specify an ordered arrangement of commands and localized titles in an application menu bar. Different UAs may determine placement of the menu bar in different ways. For example a general purpose browser may include a separate menu bar for the HTML document’s web application. However, a specialized web application UA may instead make the environment’s standard menu bar available to the HTML document application: perhaps providing only a Quit command on it's own.

[only a preliminary draft/stub]

Discussion and evaluation

Email

WG members should post feedback and other discussion to the WG’s list serve (the URI for the links below provides date information). Search on this email subject.

• initial message (Robert Burns)

See also

KeyBindingMarkup: Input device key binding cascade mechanism