CAPS LIKE WHOA (jc) wrote in lj_userdoc,
CAPS LIKE WHOA
jc
lj_userdoc

Drop-down pop-up menu box!

A recent and slightly heated discussion in #lj_da prompted me to conduct a poll in the macosx community. If you haven't already done so, go fill it out, then read on.

I deliberately avoided naming my preference in the body of the macosx post to prevent placing a bias on the voting. In the short space of time since I put this poll up, "drop-down menu" is the clear favourite with close to 75% of the votes; this is interesting, as the FAQ currently uses "drop-down box".

Trivial though it sounds, this is an issue because the User Interface element in question behaves differently on different OSes. wibbble explains the differing behaviour for me:
...traditionally this is called 'drop-down' from Windows, where the widget behaves in that manner. Mac users traditionally call it a 'pop-up', since that's how it works here.
charles explains the underlying issue quite eloquently:
...there's no way to name the widget consistently across platforms, because the widget itself is different. This is why HTML cops out and just calls it "select", leaving it up to the implementation to decide how the selection takes place.
I'd much prefer if the FAQs called this element some name that accurately identified it regardless of platform, but failing that and based purely on the macosx poll, the FAQ should consistently call it "drop-down menu".

Thoughts?
Tags: status-resolved
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