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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Wow, weird to see markup of mine show up in a blog somewhere.

Meta tags are the most standards compliant way to do those jump menus. I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. From an implementation perspective, I'd much rather they let me link to a manifest file of some kind than add multiple meta tags in places, but it's not a horrible choice.

As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd implemented it as a menu tag, we wouldn't have put it on Ars for the purposes of that article.

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> I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome.

The <title> tag does it with no big issue. Though an external <link>ed file (à la RSS/ATOM) would be much better. Meta tags are not really structured and forces everybody to download a bunch of browser-specific crap they don't carte for.

> As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd implemented it as a menu tag, we wouldn't have put it on Ars for the purposes of that article.

Why not? If you don't already have a menu with these "essential tasks" it becomes a great one, and if you do have one and don't want to bother with reimplementing it as <menu> (yet anyway) display: none on the jumplist menu.

Because as people have already said, doing a CSS hack so that your <menu> hack doesn't display in the page itself is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the <meta> name option and the browser is not required to implement handlers for all names. Given that this is not display HTML, I think the <meta> tag is the perfect place for this.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attr-meta...

> Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the <meta> name option

Just because the standard places no restriction on it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

> doing a CSS hack

Setting a CSS property is not a hack.

> so that your <menu> hack

Using existing, well-defined elements whose purpose perfectly fit the needs of the situation is not a hack.

> is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

There is nothing non-standard-compliant about using a <menu> object for defining a menu.

I don’t think you understand what “CSS hack” means.

By hack I meant workaround to overload the original function of the CSS menu tag to replicate the function of the <meta> tag. The <meta> tag is explicitly meant to represent metadata about the page. The <menu> tag is explicitly meant to represent a menu in the page.

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