Tips for a horizontal tab menu (XML? JavaScript? XHTML?)

Hi

I'm going to build a website soon and was hoping someone could give me some
suggestions/ideas for the navigation. You see, the site will have around
50-60 subpages, so I'm looing for a simple and easy-to-update solution.

I wanted to do the navigation like this:
http://www.blackboxglobal.com/usability-methods.html
http://www.lundbeck.com/careers/work...ts/default.asp

....horizontal tab menus in different levels. Its very easy to navigate and
doesn't require a lot of space. Creating the CSS for the colors and styles
is no problem. The problem is that I don't know how I can make the site
generate the menu tabs automatically, highlighting the active page AND the
active parent page etc.

As far as I can see its done with CSS lists and divs... but how do I make
the active page detect what page is active and put in that
"class="menu_selected" in between the lists?? Does it make any sense? How do
you guys do it? I think I read somewhere that XHTML could do it... just
can't seem to find any more information than that.

I work in dreamweaver and was wondering if there are some extensions or
plugins that can do the trick. I would prefer to solve it with placing the
same javascript on every page and then have the whole structure placed in an
external XML document.


Hope some of you guys can help. Thanks in advance.
-Chris
chris (AT) klon2 (DOT) dk