[UPHPU] javascript dropdown menu

[Wade Preston Shearer]

I have always considered any script that is available as a free menu  
script to not be acceptable because they are written to allow maximum  
flexibility and customization. The author the such scripts would  
content that that is the point, but that is not what I want. This makes  
them very bloated and very tricky to debug. These types of scripts are  
fine for newbies on their geocity account, but not for professional web  
design.

I have never understood why dynamic menus need anything more dynamic  
than showing them and hiding them. Unless you are looking for some  
animation (sliding or fading or something), why dynamically generate  
the menu[1] on the fly? It just makes the code more complicated and  
makes achieving cross-browser compliance even more complicated.

DHTML menus should be a piece of cake... a completely cross-browser  
piece of cake.

Someday we might be able to use pure CSS menus, but IE probably won't  
support that until the release of Blackcomb[2] sometime around 2014.  
Until then, all you need for a DHTML menu is to toggle either the  
visibility or the display of a layer on and off with onmouseover or  
onmouseclick. I recommend using visibility for most situations. This  
allows for complete control and flexibility of design and layout. You  
put the menu in a hidden/none <div> and design it exactly how you want  
with CSS. Then you show/hide it exactly where you want on the page when  
the user mousesover something. Bing, you have menus.

[2] By "menu," I am referring to the structure of the menu and the  
script running it. You can feed in dynamic content via PHP.

[1]  
http://www.windowsbeta.net/modules.php? 
modname=custompage&name=Blackcomb

> Hello all,
>
> I'm considering using a javascript drop-down menu and would like to  
> hear
> recommendations. My requirements are:
>
> 1. DOM compliant (so that it works in all modern browsers)
> 2. Small file size (for my modem-using visitors -- this is also a  
> reason
> to use a DOM-compliant menu system . . . all the extra code required to
> get it to run in 4x browsers is just bloat)
> 3. An easy-to-understand API for creating the menus
> 4. Not much else -- I need to controll colours, but I don't need a lot
> of other fancy features
>
> I know there are A LOT of menus out there already. Ay recommendations?
>
> Dave