#1242: Other Spec Review: HTML menu elements

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Opened Jul 1, 2026

Specification

https://whatpr.org/html/12011/interactive-elements.html#the-menubar-element from https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/12011 although some aspects are a bit out of date relative to the explainer, which is more current

Explainer

https://open-ui.org/components/menu.explainer/

Links

  • Previous early design review, if any: none
  • An introduction to the feature, aimed at unfamiliar audiences: https://open-ui.org/components/menu.explainer/#introduction
  • A description of the problems that end-users were facing before this proposal: Menus on web sites often work in inconsistent ways and often in ways that do not serve the needs of users who depend on the keyboard or on assistive technology.
  • Alternatives considered: See the "General questions" section of the explainer and its many subsections.
  • Examples of how to use the proposal to solve the end-users' problems: https://open-ui.org/components/menu.explainer/#examples--code-snippets
  • What do the end-users experience with this proposal: Hopefully users will experience menus on the web that have more consistent patterns between sites in terms of supporting the same (and good) mouse behaviors, keyboard navigation and focus behavior, and exposure to assistive technology, and other accessibility characteristics.
  • User research you did to validate the problem and/or design, if any: none (though there were some points in the process where we did research about patterns used on existing sites to answer specific design questions, but I'd need to dig around to find it)
  • Web Platform Tests: https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/menu/

The specification

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

Also cc: other contributors @domfarolino @scottaohara @lukewarlow @josepharhar @mfreed7 @davidsgrogan

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Comment by @domfarolino Jul 1, 2026 (See Github)

Note that https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/580 and https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1317 have already been filed.