inbn
Consider another name for the "Dropdown menu" component
"Drop-down" can mean one of a dozen or so different kinds of controls. For this reason, web designers don't have a common understanding of what "drop-down" means.
I get that naming things is hard. With this component gallery, do we want to merely echo what other people are calling things, or do we want to nudge people to use more accurate terminology?
Hey there, thanks for opening an issue. I'm all too familiar with the problems associated with the word 'drop-down' — however, I think that grouping components that have a similar appearance and behave in a similar sort of way (at least to users not using a screenreader) is preferable to having lots more very specific components.
As a rule, I've tried to balance familiarity with correctness. e.g. in this case, I think that adding separate components for 'ARIA Listbox', 'ARIA Combobox', datalist etc. would only help the small minority of people who already know what these terms mean.
I do think that I could do a better job of explaining this and will definitely add Adrian's article as a resource to the related component pages.
I think you've done a good job with the grouping of components under Dropdown Menu. They all seem to fit under the definition:
A menu in which options are hidden by default but can be shown by interacting with a button; it differs from a select in that it shows actions or navigation options and is not a form input.
But something to think about is component.gallery has become a great resource to have discussions on naming especially across the chasm between developers and designers. And if the canonical name continues to be something that we can for the most part agree isn't great, it will most likely continue to be used to name new iterations of this component.
Another point against the name Dropdown that isn't alluded to in Adrian's article is that in many versions of the component it doesn't always "drop down" below its trigger.
For example:
- In Ant Designs's version, you can set the placement of the component in relation to the trigger so that it can be placed to the top of or to the bottom of the trigger.
- In Vercel's version, it dynamically changes it position when the component will be cutoff by the viewport or it's too close to the bottom edge.
All this is to say I think the grouping makes a lot of sense and would leave it as is. But it might be helpful to pick a better name for the grouping, one that aligns itself more so to the definition and potentially has less baggage than Dropdown.
What about Action Menu? Or just plain Menu (though that probably brings a whole new kind of baggage though)?
