What is a Dropdown Menu?
A dropdown menu is a kind of floating menu that appears when you click a button on the screen, called this way because they generally "drop down," i.e. they appear slide downward when you click on something, such as the submenus found in the menubar. It's similar to how a table has its header at the top: the thing you click on becomes the header of the menu that appears under it.
Dropdown menus are also called popup menus, because they pop up out of nowhere. All kinds of popup menus, including dropdown menus and context menus, are generally modal, which means that you can't have two popup menus on screen at the same time. If you click anywhere on the screen but on the menu, the menu disappears (i.e. the action is cancelled). If you press the Esc key, which normally means "to cancel an action," the menu disappears, too.
Dropdown menus are sometimes lists of items. They're found, for example, in combo boxes, search boxes, and address bars, which can suggest values in a dropdown to complete what you're typing as you type it. On any menu that is a vertical list, it's possible to navigate the menu with your keyboard using the Arrow Keys and activate items pressing the Enter key.
Observation: there's on strange exception where you have a "drop up" menu! For example, the context menus for tasks in the taskbar in Windows 11. Normally, a context menu appears from the exact position of the mouse cursor, however, in the Windows 11's taskbar they appear anchored to the task's icon, which makes me uncomfortable for some reason. Because the taskbar is at the bottom of the screen, there's no space under it for the menu to drop "down," so it drops up instead. I suppose you could call it a raise-up menu? Following our table-header analogy, there's no reason why we couldn't have "dropleft or dropright menus either, with their headers at the sides.
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