Our All New, Standards compliant, CSS driven, drop-down menu system is
currently being beta-tested on this site. The three menus at the top of every
page use this new system. We still have a few glitches to iron out but it
seems to work perfectly in almost every browser we've tested it in so far.
We've looked at dozens of DHTML menu systems. Some of them looked great but required
a huge javascript library of 30k or more! Others lacked the flexibility that we
wanted as designers, and none of them were standards compliant.
If you turn off Javascript and turn off all styles, this is how search engines see your
site. If your menus don't become a regular list of links with Javascript and Styles turned
off, your navigation is invisible to search engines, mobile devices, and users with
disabilities.
Pure CSS menus are a step in the right direction because they are standards compliant.
They use CSS rollover properties to show and
hide unordered lists of menu links. CSS is used to change the appearance of the unordered
lists. With all styles disabled, the menus simply appear as bullet lists of links.
While CSS Menus are okay, they didn't offer the design flexibility we wanted. We like a
slight delay before the menu disappears if the user rolls their mouse outside the menu for a
second. We also like menus that reposition themselves inside the browser window if they appear
beyond the edges. These features require Javascript. Finally, we don't like our menus to appear as
bullet lists when styles are turned off. Turn styles off for this site*, and you'll see that
our menus appear as regular links, separated like this:
page 1 | page 2 | page 3.
*To turn styles on and off, use the Stylesheets links
located on the site map page.
Firefox users, select
View > Page Style > No Style.
DropMenu has been updated for HTML5 and position:fixed
DIVs. It is currently being used on this site!
If you have any comments, suggestions,
or bug reports, please don't hesitate to contact us.
02 Feb 2006 4:22am
"The dropmenu code for this site was updated today. Please leave a comment if you see any problems with it in your browser.
Thanks,
Rob G"
11 Mar 2008 7:19pm
"The dropmenu code was updated again today. It now hides embedded Flash movies that would otherwise appear on top of the menus. There was also a slight bug in IE7 where menus would sometimes disappear right away. This has been fixed.
Thanks,
Rob G"
13 Aug 2008 7:55am
"Is there a link to download the files? I'm either blind or this isn't for the public yet?
[reply from Rob G]
Yeah, sorry. Eventually we'll have a ZIP file or something. We still need to write some documentation to go with it."