The WebKit team has concrete plans for an interesting new Touch Bar Web API. Certain models of MacBook Pro have a Touch Bar at the top of their keyboards, which displays relevant application controls and shortcuts; they essentially act as dynamic function keys. In anticipation of this plan, <menuitem> has already been partially implemented, and this preliminary work has been released in Safari Technology Preview 44.
Last month, Aishwarya Nirmal of Apple gave some details of this plan to the webkit-dev mailing list:
Hello Webkit Dev!
I am working on a Touch Bar Web API that would allow websites to customize touch bar controls. There is currently no web standard for an interface like the touch bar, so my plan is to experiment with this feature and gather feedback that can inform a web standard.
We have a fairly solid plan for how we want to go forward with this. We are planning to make use of the existent menu and menuitem tags to define the touch bar and touch bar items, respectively. The menu will be recognized as a touch bar menu if it has the type attribute “touch-bar”, and its contents would be rendered in the touch bar.
I will be posting and landing patches under an experimental feature flag. The umbrella bug on Bugzilla can be found here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178736 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178736 .
Thank you,
Aishwarya
Because this plan introduces a new HTML attribute value and a major new use case for two existing HTML elements, @annevk requested also giving notice to the HTML Standard community. I could not find any current discussion, so I am raising it here. I hope this is not out of line.
The WebKit team has concrete plans for an interesting new Touch Bar Web API. Certain models of MacBook Pro have a Touch Bar at the top of their keyboards, which displays relevant application controls and shortcuts; they essentially act as dynamic function keys. In anticipation of this plan,
<menuitem>has already been partially implemented, and this preliminary work has been released in Safari Technology Preview 44.Last month, Aishwarya Nirmal of Apple gave some details of this plan to the webkit-dev mailing list:
Because this plan introduces a new HTML attribute value and a major new use case for two existing HTML elements, @annevk requested also giving notice to the HTML Standard community. I could not find any current discussion, so I am raising it here. I hope this is not out of line.