XPToolkit Menu Requirements

Written by Chris Saari
Last Modified by: Chris Saari
Last Modified: 3/9/99

Overview

This document covers the menu bar, menu lists, and menu items. This does not cover context menus, although they should be very similar. This does not cover popup menus, those are a seperate widget. This does not cover keyboard equivalents or accelerators for menus, pending more work in that area. This lightly touches menu/command merging, but that is very preliminary.

A menu item is a line item in a visible UI menu. It has text (displayed visually) and may contain a shortcut key (cmd-Q for example). A menu item can be enabled or disabled separately from the other items around it. A special kind of menu item, called a separator, is visually represented as a disabled horizontal line with no text.

A menu list corresponds to an entire UI menu, and is a sequential ordered list of menu items. A menu list may be hierarchical and have sub-menu lists hanging off of items.

A menu bar is an ordered collection of menu lists. Menu bars are used to present several menus, usually in a non-transient way. Context menus, for example, would not use a menu bar since they are only displaying a single transient menu.

Requirements

Internationalization support. Dependent upon each OS's support?
Keyboard navigation, both keyboard accelerators and equivalents
Menus can be generated from an RDF data source
Menus must be fully dynamic
Menus must know how to stream, which means that they need to have a notion of a "Receiving data" child that can eventually be replaced with the real children once they've arrived

Menu Bars

create a menu bar
destroy a menu bar
draw a menu bar
get menu bar of a window
set menu bar of a window
set default menu bar for app (Mac apps can have menu bars with no windows)
highlight a menu bar item (needed?)

Menu List

create a menu list (menu)
destroy a menu list (menu)
add a menu list (menu) to menu bar
insert a menu list (menu) in a menu bar
remove a menu list (menu) from a menu bar
enable/disable a menu list

Menu Items

create a menu item
destroy a menu item
add a menu item to a menu list (menu)
remove a menu item from a menu list (menu)
add a separator to a menu list (menu)
get a menu item's text
set a menu item's text
check/uncheck a menu item
enable/disable a menu item
query if menu item is checked
query if menu item is enabled
query if menu item has a submenu
assign a submenu to an menu item
remove a submenu from a menu item

Menu Item Arbitration / Merging

We are unclear at this time if Menu Merging is a requirement.

Questions, comments, or concerns about this document should go tonetscape.public.mozilla.xpfe