jQuery Forum

jQuery UI menu comments

These are negative comments on the menu demos found in file:///.../jquery-ui-1.9m6/demos/menu/index.html

There are no positive comments, the entire world is aware of the great work you do and how you are making possible to build more humane web applications, thanks!

I'm an interaction designer, looking for a minimalistic pop-up menu widget with high stability and lasting support. It's to be used in a test case management open source tool developed with Java in the back-end.

Here are my findings, hoping that you find them useful. I apologize for any annoyances in this posting, due to my lack of knowledge. 

Default functionality

• The menu column spans all the available width of the viewport
• When the viewport is narrowed, the menu column seems to have a min-width of 340px and much less in IE8

Context menu

• Does not behave like a context menu. TO behave so it must:
  • Be normally hidden
  • Be associated to a specific UI artifact
  • Show upon mouse right click or the Windows "application key"
  • Have its upper left (right if RTL) corner positioned where the mouse was clicked
  • Be expanded, not requiring an extra click to show its items
  • Hide on blur, even on mouse out
  • Expand submenus depending on hover or click
• The demoed artifact is useful for use cases like Gmail's "More actions" menu
• The menu shown in http://69.164.203.135/jquery-ui/demos/popup/popup-menu-table.html when clicking the "Options" buttons behaves more like a context menu, only it should open by right-clicking the row or whatever it's context was instead of a button (this menu would benefit a lot if menu width was automatic)

Top-aligned sub menus

• This is an unusual arrangement, IMO you should not invest much time in it
• A delay is needed in order to be able to move the mouse to the lower level items
• Children menus should close when the mouse pointer leaves
• Clicking a group item should not close the related submenu
• Clicking "Salzburg" and hovering "Delphi" after, displays two selected items (the clicked one remains selected forever)

Navigation menu

• This one works very well
• The widths should be automatic
• To beat Windows menus, it would be interesting (and maybe easyly done) to explore a nultiline item in an options column with max-width

  Windows sports annoyingly wide menus when they contain lengthy items like long file paths

• One can move the pointer from top menu´s "Delphi" to submenu´s "Salzburg" in a diagonal path briefly selecting "top Saarland" and "top Salzburg", which is A Good Thing, only that:
  • "top Saarland" and "top Salzburg" get selected briefly, scaring the user (what did I do?!)
  • You can't go from "top Salzburg" to "Perch" in the same way: when the pointer leaves the top menu, the sub-menu closes immediately
• Clicking in any item is recorded in the history stack, which is unusual. Clicking the back button replays all the clicks (only FF 8.0 and Chrome 17.0.942, IE8 does not maybe because of a bug