John I agree, do you have ideas on how to implement that?
In reality I can write menu() completely in tal if I really
need it. But having the menu() (and implementing the checklist or 
radiolist display methods in addition to menu) is a big win. 

One of the backburner items is to support html5 as an html_version
value. So changing an implementation could be done for the html5
version so as to not require changes unless the user is also
changing html format.