Menu OPTIONs

The OPTION element can only occur within a SELECT element. It represents a possible choice. It can only contain text, together with SGML entities for accented characters etc.

When the form is submitted, the NAME of the enclosing SELECT element is paired with the OPTION's VALUE attribute to contribute a name/value pair for the selection. Unselected options don't contribute to the form's submitted data. You can initialize the option to its selected state by including the SELECT attribute.

The SHAPE attribute is used for graphical menus to specify the region of the background image to be associated with this option. It uses the same definition as for the anchor element.

Permitted Attributes

ID

An SGML identifier used as the target for hypertext links or for naming particular elements in associated style sheets. Identifiers are NAME tokens and must be unique within the scope of the current document.

LANG

This is one of the ISO standard language abbreviations, e.g. "en.uk" for the variation of English spoken in the United Kingdom. It can be used by parsers to select language specific choices for quotation marks, ligatures and hypenation rules etc. The language attribute is composed from the two letter language code from ISO 639, optionally followed by a period and a two letter country code from ISO 3166.

CLASS

This a space separated list of SGML NAME tokens and is used to subclass tag names. By convention, the class names are interpreted hierarchically, with the most general class on the left and the most specific on the right, where classes are separated by a period. The CLASS attribute is most commonly used to attach a different style to some element, but it is recommended that where practical class names should be picked on the basis of the element's semantics, as this will permit other uses, such as restricting search through documents by matching on element class names. The conventions for choosing class names are outside the scope of this specification.

DISABLED

When present, the option should be rendered as normal, but can't be modified by the user. Where practical the rendering should provide a cue that the option is disabled e.g. by graying out the text, changing the color of the background or similar.

ERROR

This attribute specifies an error message explaining why the option is inappropriate. When this attribute is missing, the option can be assumed to be ok. User agents are recommended to provide a cue to indicate that the option is in error.

VALUE

The string to be used together with the name attribute of the enclosing select element, when submitting the form. It defaults to the content of the OPTION element.

SELECTED

When present, this attribute signifies that the option should be initialized in its selected state. It is an error for more than one option to be selected for single choice menus.

SHAPE

This attribute is used within menus to define shaped hotzones associated with this option's value. The attribute value is a string taking one of the following forms:

"default"

Used to define a default menu choice for the menu background.

"circle x, y, r"

Where x and y define the center and r specifies the radius.

"rect x, y, w, h"

Where x, y define the upper left corner and w, h define the width and height respectively

"polygon x1, y1, x2, y2, ..."

Given n pairs of x, y coordinates, the polygon is closed by a line linking the n'th point to the first. Intersecting polygons use the non-zero winding number rule to determine if a point lies inside the polygon.

If a pointer event occurs in a region where two or more shapes overlap, the distance from the point to the center of gravity of each of the overlapping shapes is computed and the closest one chosen. This feature is useful when you want lots of closely spaced hotzones, for example over points on a map, as it allows you to use simple shapes without worrying about overlaps.

Note: The x coordinate increases to the right, and the y coordinate increases downwards in the same way as IMG and image maps. If both numbers are integers, the coordinates are interpreted as pixel offsets from the upper left corner of the image. Otherwise, the coordinates are interpreted as scaled values in the range 0.0 to 1.0 across the image. Note the syntax is tolerant of repeated white space characters between tokens.