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Suggest adding a type of popup (type=popup), which would have the standard open/close menu behavior built in. Also suggest making popup the default, rather than list.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: We can't change the default, since that would break back-compat. As far as I can tell, the suggested type=popup is exactly what a <menu> nested in a type=toolbar <menu> would do per spec today: <menu> <menu type=toolbar label="..."> ... </menu> </menu> Originally IIRC you could do what you describe basically one of the options was that <menu> would turn into a button. However, it's not clear that that kind of UI is actually something we want to encourage outside of a toolbar, which is why it ended up being made just a feature of the toolbar (much like how submenus are a feature of a context menu).
Per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html, the HTML A11Y TF does not plan to formally work on this issue at this time. This does not mean the TF has no interest in it, but does not have immediate plans to work on it. The TF may review the issue in the future.
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Bug triage sub-team thinks the approach in the editor response addresses the issue.