Answering the call from Joel on Software.
I want a way to access a browser's right-click menu. I am a right-click-aholic. I right-click on everything to get that little drop down context menu. Right click on this object on a webpage, get this menu; right click on this other widget, get this menu.
I would love to be able to right-click on a blog entry that gets slurped into my web-based aggregator and click "send this to Saved Items." Or, just be able to right click on an email listing in Gmail and select "Mark as Spam" or "Add label X."
To make some suggestions to some of his points:
Improved inline editing (step one: make contentEditable work in Gecko just like it does in IE 5.5+)
I think that this should do the trick — Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor.
Javascript features to do fast REST queries back to the server, so I can implement things like a lush spell checker with the dictionary on the server. It should be possible to have a 300,000 employee directory on the server and create a web app that has a list box where you can type the first few letters of an employee's name and see a filtered list as fast as you can type on the screen.
XMLHttpRequest. As a matter of fact, Gmail does this auto-completion of the address field when composing email.
A rich set of standard controls for application development that provide better ways... to drag and drop
There are two good cross-browser libraries discussed in Drag and drop with Javascript that are feature rich.
Comments
I don't thing you're quite right on the inline editing thing. In IE based browsers, you can do some magic with inline editing of text.
For example, you have your blog entry. When you browse to alpha-geek.com, you can do some magic like say
<div ondoubleclick="div.id.contentEditable=true">
entry text</div>
What this does is then magically makes the text area in the middle of the page you're viewing completely editable.
Wouldn't that be nice for fixing quick typo's in your posts?
An RTE works for a webmail or 'send a greeting' app or something, but this is more generic, this is INline editing.
Of course, this requires you to put something in your JS to authenticate the users, post the new content back to the server when you double-click to leave 'edit' mode, etc. But it is really nice.
We included this in the CMS I used to work on, and people absolutely went ape shit over it. It was one thing to have a CMS, but then when you could preview your site, and make changes without leaving the site at all. It was really, really nice.
Oooh, that is super nice. Yea, I would like that, too. Something like that build into WebDAV (WebDAV as described in RFCs 2518 and 3253) with some (Java|EMCA)Script hooks into it. That would be niiiiiiice.
If you like right-clickability, you should take a look at Oddpost.
They've done some pretty groovy things with DHTML, drag-n-drop and of course, right click.
I agree with the need for access to the right click context menu, however, the solution that I have used for some of my projects has been a mouse gesture driven additional right click menu. Basicaly, right click and drag the mouse down a bit and a different menu pop's up. This allows some flexabilty to have an extensive menu that you only see when you need it, where as replacing the main right click context could allow people to bloat things like crazy and make quite an anoying expereince when all you want to do is "save as".
I don't know if right-click-and-drag is the solution, but I have installed a mozilla extension especially to stop websites trying to control my right-click button so I certainly do not want any website removing anything from my menu and that might end up making things too cluttered. Hmmm
When you right click on any web page, a drop down box is displayed.How do i remove items from this list? Your help is much appreciative....