Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Navigation á la carte? - A few thoughts on Menus

Pop down and pop out menus are all the rage. I have used some here and I am planning others in a another project.

A good time to review this method of navigation and see what tools and methods are available.

furthermore...

Because I flip between bbEdit and GoLive, I thought I would give MenuMachine, from bigBangExtensions a try. This is how I have achieved the look of the site mentioned above. The site validates as XHTML Transitional and the CSS returns no errors. The user interface within GoLive is a splendid piece of work and does a good job of creating clean looking menus, in all sorts of configurations. Behind the scenes, the code produced is a combination of javascript and CSS. And, good as the results are, the code can become a trifle bloated. My current choice for another project is to use CSS only (with a bit of special code for Internet Explorer), using un-ordered lists. Using lists for menus is a good choice because it seems to be semantically correct and offers potential for hierachy (lists within lists). Getting rectangular boxes, vertically or horizontally, is painless, but I recommend you look at Eric Meyer's book: More Eric Meyer on CSS where he covers building such a menu in great detail. What you will notice, is that he is forced to use an ''htc' file, details of which you will find on Peter Nederlof's site. For a full explanation of these effects look at Eric Meyer's demo You will find a variety of tools on the market to help build menus, some are using Flash, some javascript. In my web search, I was particularly impressed with the system at Brothercake, and you might well be tempted to spend the money!