Toolbox/Toolbar Requirements

by Mike Pinkerton
Last Modified 3/12/99

Overview

This document covers two related UI elements: Toolboxes and Toolbars.

A Toolbar is a bar which contains arbitrary HTML (but normally XUL elements). The look of the toolbar can be customizable through CSS and is smart enough to wrap to multiple lines if there are too many elements on it to fit within a single line. Toolbars can live anywhere within a XUL window, not just at the top.

A Toolbox contains one or more toolbars and is used to group multiple bars together so the user can rearrange, collapse, and hide individual toolbars within the box. Within the toolbox, each toolbar gets a "grippy" which is the mechanism for collapsing (by clicking inside it) or rearranging (by dragging the grippy). When a toolbar is collapsed, it appears only as a horizontal grippy in a special area below all visible toolbars. This area is hidden when no toolbars are collapsed. Clicking on the horizontal grippy associated with the toolbar will make it reappear in its previous position.

Requirements

What We Are Doing For Toolboxes:

• Pick up style, colors, and backgrounds from stylesheets
• Specify grippy look via style sheet (background-image as well, as long as it isn't of fixed size)
• Show or hide toolbars (4.x behavior)
• Be able to collapse down to a tab and expand by clicking on that tab (4.x behavior)
• Toolbars can be rearranged within a toolbox but each toolbar takes the entire horizontal space of the toolbox (can't have two toolbars on same line) (4.x behavior)
• Allow toolbars to grow to a multiple rows if its content cannot shrink to fit in the available space.
• The toolbox will be modifiable at runtime through the DOM APIs (adding and removing toolbars, etc)
• Local/Remote merging will be done by hooking up a toolbox to an RDF data source
• Toolbox content can be generated from an RDF data source (eg, the toolbar list)
• Tooltips on collapsed grippies

What We Are Doing For Toolbars:

• Pick up style, colors, and backgrounds from stylesheets
• Each toolbar button should grow/shrink to fit the text. I.e. when font changes, English->German, etc.
• Items can display images only, text only, or a mixture of both (4.x behavior)
• Toolbar items should be able to specify they want to expand to the available space (url bar, for example)
• Allow toolbars to grow to a multiple rows if its content cannot shrink to fit in the available space.
• Allow specification of minimum/maximum width of toolbar elements
• Toolbar items can be right justified (eg, throbber)
• Drag items between (or within) toolbars to rearrange
• Delete items from toolbars with drag and drop
• Items can have rollover feedback or not, specified by style sheets
• Items can have tooltips
• The toolbar will be modifiable at runtime through the DOM APIs (adding and removing items, etc)
• Local/Remote merging will be done by hooking up a toolbar to an RDF data source (eg, for Personal Toolbar)
• Toolbar content can be generated from an RDF data source
• Can have context menus, activated by a context-click on any empty space in the toolbar

What We Are NOT Doing:

• Toolbar buttons will not necessarily be the same size across a toolbar.
• Grippies that represent collapsed toolbars will not be as wide as the toolbar is tall (taking the toolbar height from before it was collapsed as in 4.x). Instead they will be of a consistant size.
• The animation will always remain on the main toolbar, regardless of that toolbar's visibility or location. This is different from 4.x Win32 behavior, but is how 4.x MacOS behaved.
• Allowing the buttons to be arranged right-to-left (needed for Arabic and Hebrew). This would need to be done by modifying the XUL, or the RDF data source which generates the toolbar DOM.