[xwiki-devs] [VOTE] Enable default actions for the Flamingo top menu entries

Hi everyone, = Short Story = I propose to change the behaviour of the top level menu from Flamingo for tablet and desktop screens (so NOT for phones) to match the behaviour we had in 6.2 BUT improving the separation between the navigation links and the drop down toggle. The idea is that the top level menu entries should behave like a drop down button (e.g. the Add button) but without looking like one. You can see some screen shots at http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11517. = Long Story = I've heard complains that the current behaviour of the top level menu from Flamingo skin is not perfect. The issue is that you need to click twice to navigate. Ok, with a mouse you can use the middle click (wheel) to open the link in a new tab but still it's annoying for simple uses and for those that use the touch pad or a tablet. An alternative I have investigated in http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11479 is to open the menu on hover (on devices that support this of course). The result is quite nice and effective but there is a problem: if you have a second horizontal menu displayed under the top level menu then you'll have a hard time hovering the second menu. So I decided to close XWIKI-11479 as Won't Fix. For those that like the open-on-hover behaviour and which don't plan to use a second menu I've published this extension http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Hover+and+Default+Acti… . The other alternative to fix the problem is to go back to the behaviour from 6.2. Precisely, each menu has two sides: * on the left is the label which is a link used for navigation * on the right there is a toggle (arrow) used to open the menu. The problem with this, and the reason we change it in 6.3, was that the label and the toggle were not separated very well so the user could easily think they were doing the same action (opening the menu). At the same time this separation felt unnatural on extra small screens (phones) because you couldn't tap easily on the toggle (arrow). The solution I propose is to: * Keep the current behaviour for extra small screens (phones). That means the use has to tap twice to navigate: one tap to open the menu and another one on the "Go to this XYZ". * On desktop and tablet enable the default action (navigation link) as in 6.2 but improve the separation so that the menu behaves as much as possible as a drop down button (e.g. the Add button) without looking like one. This means: ** You should understand there are two sides without hovering ** Separate hover and active state (e.g. the link is not hovered when the toggle is hovered) I've investigated *many* ways to achieve this and the result can be seen on http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11517. This is close to http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Enable+Default+Action+… but not the same. NOTE: The way the menu behaves and looks on hover and click (text and background color) is strictly determined by the color theme. Some themes highlight the hovered menu items by changing their background color, others the text color and some do both. My changes are independent on this. We can of course improve the default color theme to better highlight the menu items. This is a different topic though. I'd like to commit this changes in 6.4. Here's my +1. Thanks, Marius