CSS drop-down menus

David Stone wrote:

In article <cgsMl.15845$hc1.14801 (AT) flpi150 (DOT) ffdc.sbc.com>,
Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> wrote:

Ed Mullen wrote:
I'm experimenting with drop-down menus using one of Stu Nichols' designs:

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/final_drop.html

My test-case files:

http://edmullen.net/menutest.php
http://edmullen.net/styles/menutest.css

Here's my problem. I can position the right and left fly-out
third-level menus. However, if the text is zoomed/enlarged, the space
between the second-level item and the fly-out changes. I've tried px, %
and em units with no success.
I looked at one of the samples here:

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/flyout2.html

and notice that there is no problem there. So, I'm thinking you need to
either pick a different menu (it is unreal the number he has made) or
take the stylesheet back to square one and see what changes you've made
that break it.


Did you try looking at the Ruthsarian menus? There are drop down
versions of those.

http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/rMenu/

I'll look into it tomorrow or the next day. But, just going to the link
you posted sent me into sensory overload. I don't think I've seen more
content posted on a single page - EVER. Either I've had too much to
drink or not enough.

I'll give it a go tomorrow. Much appreciate the suggestion.

--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
How much deeper would oceans be if sponges didn't live there?

dorayme wrote:

In article <no.email-DE2865.10221408052009 (AT) news1 (DOT) chem.utoronto.ca>,
David Stone <no.email (AT) domain (DOT) invalid> wrote:

...

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus are
often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain,

Very very easy to maintain with javascript. If you put the list of items
in an external javascript file you can update all the pages on your
site at once, and if the list is driven by your CMS, trivial to
maintain. CSS dropdowns are a different story.


and often an excuse for

poor design of the website in the first place. And multi level ones are
often of doubtful value all things considered.

I agree.

Jeff

They are to be avoided by anyone new to website making in the same way
that website generators are to be avoided.

dorayme wrote:

In article <no.email-DE2865.10221408052009 (AT) news1 (DOT) chem.utoronto.ca>,
David Stone <no.email (AT) domain (DOT) invalid> wrote:

...

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus are
often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain,

Agreed. Hence my quest for a better implementation.

and often an excuse for
poor design of the website in the first place.

That seems a very generalized and out-of-hand comment and unsubstantiated.

And multi level ones are
often of doubtful value all things considered.

Well, virtually every program on my Windows computers uses them. So.
My premise is that *most* users/visitors will be familiar with the
concept. Which was, by the way, not a Microsoft innovation, it was an
Apple one. Or, more correctly, Apple stole it from PARC, MS stole it
from Apple ... but, hey, drop-down menus? Of all the multi-millions of
computer users today how many don't use them for hours every day?

Hell, in this Mozilla-based email client I'm using I look up at the menu
bar. I click on File. I get a drop-down menu with 10 options, three of
which lead to another menu.

They are to be avoided by anyone new to website making

So, could you suggest an alternative? Or are you just condemning?
Should we make a Web site that deviates from the most-commonly used menu
structure in the most-common OS? Or attempt to mimic it to give users
something very familiar?

I don't know about you, dorayme, but I enjoy not having to guess what
human interface I need to employ. I prefer it when I see something familiar.

Yes, I heard the comment about maintenance etc. Hello? That was the
point of my experiment: I'm trying to find the latest and greatest,
something that requires the fewest hacks for IE, something that is
well-documented, simply templated.

IT IS AN EXPERIMENT. Labeled as such.

Now. I've abandoned Stu Nichols' stuff. Too pixel perfect, poorly
documented, not easily adaptable. But, while that menu has died,
relative to my OP, the discussion rages on ...


--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
"Yes, I guess, they oughtta name a drink after you." - John Prine

dorayme wrote:

In article <m1k54r9g0d.fsf (AT) dot-app (DOT) org>,
Sherm Pendley <spamtrap (AT) dot-app (DOT) org> wrote:

dorayme <doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> writes:

They are to be avoided by anyone new to website making in the same
way that website generators are to be avoided.

Generators are to be avoided? Then how am I supposed to power my data
center when the power grid fails, hmmm? Not everyone has access to
your fancy Martian technology, you know!


I always recommend that *newbie data* centre operators operate the
crank handle in such situations. Like on old Rovers and Bentleys when
the batteries are flat. <g

Hamsters. One needs lots of hamsters. Lots of them running in little
turbines. Lots.

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme
<doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> writing in
news:doraymeRidThis-14DAE9.12022409052009 (AT) news (DOT) albasani.net:

In article <Xns9C05AC2F766D0arbpenyahoocom (AT) 207 (DOT) 115.33.102>,
Adrienne Boswell <arbpen (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed dorayme
doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> writing in news:doraymeRidThis-
78D8C5.08425209052009 (AT) news (DOT) albasani.net:

In article <no.email-DE2865.10221408052009 (AT) news1 (DOT) chem.utoronto.ca>,
David Stone <no.email (AT) domain (DOT) invalid> wrote:

...

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus
are often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain, and often an
excuse for poor design of the website in the first place. And multi
level ones are often of doubtful value all things considered.

They are to be avoided by anyone new to website making in the same
way that website generators are to be avoided.


Thank you, my dear friend! I am redoing a site
[http://kitchenbuilders.net/]. It's got all sorts of problems.
Probably the worst is a javascript generated multilevel menu. No js
- no way to navigate.

I was thinking about redoing correctly, but the more I think about
it, the more I realize it's more a matter of reorganization that
fixing bad navigation.

I really don't like multi-level flyout type menus, they are a PITA if
you don't move your mouse in just the right way. That goes for web
based, and programs.

Yes, I think good navigation follows naturally upon good organization.
To try to fix up poor organization by a super drop down is really
sweeping things under the carpet. A website is not like a city such as
Sydney, easy enough to get about if you have a great street
directory!

Or Glendale, where the streets are in alphabetic order, well at least the
ones that run north and south.

I looked at the site you are to redo and that menu flashes on and off
as you hold the mouse over it to read the submenus - very distracting!

Yup, I don't like that either.

But, apart from this, here is a good example of what should be
avoided. A nice thing for a home page to be is *uncomplicated*. Sure,
folks want to know where to look for different sorts of slabs. But not
everyone knows or is interested in what types there are straight off
to the extent that they want to go to the trouble of doing pesky mousy
things.

I had fun last night duplicating that first page. As you know, most of
it is graphics, including all the text about the special. Completely
unavailable to search engines and others. I'll be posting later with
just that page, to see how and if it breaks.

A simple 'slabs' menu item should do, and on the destination, say to
the page of the most popular type of slab, a visible local menu to
pages for other slab types. What can be simpler and more useful? By
the author choosing the most popular and likely page as destination,
he or she caters for more people straight off. And others are not
disadvantaged because they had to mess about the other way too (with
the dropdown)

Yes, I was thinking of my friend the bread crumb trail. I really like
those. Home-->Slabs-->Granite

(btw, considering a lot of the pics do not have captions, you have a
perfect excuse to float them and avoid the table and its inability to
wrap lines and so not be as flexible for different screens.

Tables? Almost never use 'em, unless, of course, it's for real tabular
data. I can stick a pic and a caption in a div, and float those til the
cows come home. It's all going to be coming out from a db server side
anyway, so it'll eventually be a piece of cake.

Now, where is that thing I used for pics of my daughter's wedding?
Here it is, you would need simpler still, no captions:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2jcs5r
)

Nice - I like it. Thank you, and hope you have a nice weekend. We're

off to go to Los Angeles Union Station for National Train Day. My son,
Spane (5), loves trains and Stephen (57, my partner) has never been on a
train so it should be a really fun day.

Happy Mother's Day to you!


--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> writing
in news:O97Nl.29550$YU2.8700 (AT) nlpi066 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus are
often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain,

Very very easy to maintain with javascript. If you put the list of
items
in an external javascript file you can update all the pages on your
site at once, and if the list is driven by your CMS, trivial to
maintain. CSS dropdowns are a different story.

Have to disagree with you there. Keeping your items in a server side
include is one thing, but an external javascript is not going to be
available for search engines and users without javascript. There is
another post in this thread about a site I am redoing
[http://kitchenbuilders.net] that uses a javascript menu such as you
describe, and the site is not navigable with js off.

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> writing
in news:O97Nl.29550$YU2.8700 (AT) nlpi066 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus are
often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain,
Very very easy to maintain with javascript. If you put the list of
items
in an external javascript file you can update all the pages on your
site at once, and if the list is driven by your CMS, trivial to
maintain. CSS dropdowns are a different story.


Have to disagree with you there. Keeping your items in a server side
include is one thing, but an external javascript is not going to be
available for search engines and users without javascript.

What we often do in this group is concentrate on the very few and
ignore the convenience of the vast majority.

Any site with a site map will be indexed properly, and any well
designed site will have more that one way of navigating.


There is

another post in this thread about a site I am redoing
[http://kitchenbuilders.net] that uses a javascript menu such as you
describe, and the site is not navigable with js off.

Typically the links in such a top nav should function and not point to "#".

The type of navigation should be tuned to the site and the audience.
Sites marketing to businesses behind firewalls would do well not having
a javascript nav.

Javascript is widely turned on (perhaps not in this group) and with
such related bits as AJAX can do many of the same things as Flash, which
is far less accessible and SEO friendly.

With all that said, most sites I make use no javascript navigation,
but some use javascript with some side nav also. Relying on multi tier
js only is bad practice. Good navigation on complex sites is context
sensitive.

The trouble with so much of this is that navigation should be a means
to an end. Often styling the navigation trumps styling the content.

BTW, good luck with your redo, the html is a fright!

Jeff

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> writing
in news:9hhNl.29438$Ws1.26916 (AT) nlpi064 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net
writing in news:O97Nl.29550$YU2.8700 (AT) nlpi066 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Perhaps someone should remind everyone here that drop down menus
are often a bloody nuisance to make and maintain,
Very very easy to maintain with javascript. If you put the list of
items
in an external javascript file you can update all the pages on
your
site at once, and if the list is driven by your CMS, trivial to
maintain. CSS dropdowns are a different story.


Have to disagree with you there. Keeping your items in a server side
include is one thing, but an external javascript is not going to be
available for search engines and users without javascript.

What we often do in this group is concentrate on the very few and
ignore the convenience of the vast majority.

Any site with a site map will be indexed properly, and any well
designed site will have more that one way of navigating.

Absolutely, and when I can generate almost all of it server side, I'm a
happy camper.

There is
another post in this thread about a site I am redoing
[http://kitchenbuilders.net] that uses a javascript menu such as you
describe, and the site is not navigable with js off.

Typically the links in such a top nav should function and not point to
"#".

Even worse, some of them are 404s. I would rather not go anywhere than
go to a 404.

The type of navigation should be tuned to the site and the
audience.
Sites marketing to businesses behind firewalls would do well not
having a javascript nav.

Javascript is widely turned on (perhaps not in this group) and with
such related bits as AJAX can do many of the same things as Flash,
which is far less accessible and SEO friendly.

AJAX! When it fails, it fails miserably. I was changing owership on a
domain at GoDaddy yesterday, and the AJAX they used for that particular
part was horrible. Opera did not work at all, Firefox did not show all
my domains, IE chugged along and never produced a page - I gave up and
used Chrome.

With all that said, most sites I make use no javascript navigation,
but some use javascript with some side nav also. Relying on multi tier
js only is bad practice. Good navigation on complex sites is context
sensitive.

The trouble with so much of this is that navigation should be a
means
to an end. Often styling the navigation trumps styling the content.

BTW, good luck with your redo, the html is a fright!

Thank you. I know the markup is bad and terribly bloated, but I'll be
cutting and pasting from the broswer, so no nasties in the finished
markup.


--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> writing
in news:9hhNl.29438$Ws1.26916 (AT) nlpi064 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net
writing in news:O97Nl.29550$YU2.8700 (AT) nlpi066 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Have to disagree with you there. Keeping your items in a server side
include is one thing, but an external javascript is not going to be
available for search engines and users without javascript.
What we often do in this group is concentrate on the very few and
ignore the convenience of the vast majority.

Any site with a site map will be indexed properly, and any well
designed site will have more that one way of navigating.

Absolutely, and when I can generate almost all of it server side, I'm a
happy camper.

Ha! But there is the rub. If you use JavaScript to maintain and generate
your site navigation AND hard code an alternate (or use server-side)
then you now produce a maintenance problem, you have to sync TWO systems.

I long ago had a JavaScript OOPs system that was efficient and easy BUT
for the shortcomings previously mentioned. I found it was easier just to
acknowledge that for now and in the foreseeable future sites CANNOT
depend on JavaScript and JavaScript is ALWAYS optional. Bite the bullet
and generate and maintain your site's navigation with server-side
technologies.



--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net> writing
in news:9hhNl.29438$Ws1.26916 (AT) nlpi064 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:
Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeff <jeff_thies (AT) att (DOT) net
writing in news:O97Nl.29550$YU2.8700 (AT) nlpi066 (DOT) nbdc.sbc.com:

Have to disagree with you there. Keeping your items in a server side
include is one thing, but an external javascript is not going to be
available for search engines and users without javascript.
What we often do in this group is concentrate on the very few and
ignore the convenience of the vast majority.

Any site with a site map will be indexed properly, and any well
designed site will have more that one way of navigating.

Absolutely, and when I can generate almost all of it server side, I'm
a happy camper.

Ha! But there is the rub. If you use JavaScript to maintain and generate
your site navigation AND hard code an alternate (or use server-side)
then you now produce a maintenance problem, you have to sync TWO systems.

Every site has (or should have) a structure. Generally subsections are
nested in their parent section. Sometimes even more tiers are needed.
It's like a family tier flowchart.

I know that some of you are handcoding every page for your clients. I
run almost all CMS and it's a simple matter to generate a list of all
the sections on a site, or all the subsections,... Now, whether you use
that to generate a javascript menu or a sidebar navigation, is
immaterial. The CMS hold the site structure, and you slice and dice that
as needed. There is no maintenance issue.

I long ago had a JavaScript OOPs system that was efficient and easy BUT
for the shortcomings previously mentioned. I found it was easier just to
acknowledge that for now and in the foreseeable future sites CANNOT
depend on JavaScript and JavaScript is ALWAYS optional.

But it is almost always on.

Bite the bullet

and generate and maintain your site's navigation with server-side
technologies.

I only write static pages, except for stuff that is clearly dynamic.
And I haven't seen a CSS based dropdown that I like, javascript flyouts
have less trouble.

Jeff