Sorry for the off-topic subject, but I figure there are a fair few people on this list who have experience/interest in this. It's quite a common feature of websites. I'm trying to find the most cross-platform, and most gracefully degrading drop-down/pop-out menu system. The solutions I've found and come up with so far are: - http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/menubar/ Has problems and strange behaviour in Konqueror. It half works, which is worse than not working at all as it leads to very ungraceful degradation. - http://www.brothercake.com/dropdown/ Hasn't failed so far. Seems a good choice. - Flash menus Can be pretty certain about how they'll look in all browsers, and with some flash-sniffing, you can make other arrangements when necessary. - http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/ Doesn't seem to work at all well in Konqueror. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Brothercake widget as my designer sees problems with having potentially 'very tall flash movies' when there are lots of items in the drop down. Has anyone used any of the approaches I mention above? Please share experiences. Got any other ideas? cheers, tim
Works with NS4+, IE4+, NS6+, Konqueror2.2+, Opera5/6, and Moz06+ and Galeon http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/topmen3/index.htm Michael On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 13:55, Tim Hicks wrote:
Sorry for the off-topic subject, but I figure there are a fair few people on this list who have experience/interest in this. It's quite a common feature of websites.
I'm trying to find the most cross-platform, and most gracefully degrading drop-down/pop-out menu system.
The solutions I've found and come up with so far are:
- http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/menubar/ Has problems and strange behaviour in Konqueror. It half works, which is worse than not working at all as it leads to very ungraceful degradation.
- http://www.brothercake.com/dropdown/ Hasn't failed so far. Seems a good choice.
- Flash menus Can be pretty certain about how they'll look in all browsers, and with some flash-sniffing, you can make other arrangements when necessary.
- http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/ Doesn't seem to work at all well in Konqueror.
At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Brothercake widget as my designer sees problems with having potentially 'very tall flash movies' when there are lots of items in the drop down.
Has anyone used any of the approaches I mention above? Please share experiences. Got any other ideas?
cheers,
tim
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Michael Lewis wrote:
Works with NS4+, IE4+, NS6+, Konqueror2.2+, Opera5/6, and Moz06+ and Galeon
Thanks Micheal. Just checked it out and it appears it's actually the Brothercake script (in disguise). cheers, tim
Tim Hicks wrote:
I'm trying to find the most cross-platform, and most gracefully degrading drop-down/pop-out menu system.
Hiermenus works nicely. http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/ You got to pay $30 for a site license though. Another thing is: don't use dropdown menu's on a website. It is bad site architecture. Most well designed sites use a "news triangle" as the narrative structure. This means that the most important news is on top, and that less and less important news is at the bottom at the triangle. If you use dropdown menus most people will jump straight to the less important information, ignoring or missing the more important parts. It can be used with succes on an intranet though. If people has a well defined task to do and they want to get there fast to do it, then a drop down menu is good. regards Max M
Max M wrote:
Tim Hicks wrote:
I'm trying to find the most cross-platform, and most gracefully degrading drop-down/pop-out menu system.
Hiermenus works nicely. http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/ You got to pay $30 for a site license though.
Thanks for the pointer. However, as I said in my first post, I've had problems with Hiermenus and Konqueror. At the moment, if I'm going to pay for something, it'll be the Brothercake widget (although I've got a couple of other things to check out).
Another thing is: don't use dropdown menu's on a website. It is bad site architecture.
Most well designed sites use a "news triangle" as the narrative structure. This means that the most important news is on top, and that less and less important news is at the bottom at the triangle.
If you use dropdown menus most people will jump straight to the less important information, ignoring or missing the more important parts.
It can be used with succes on an intranet though. If people has a well defined task to do and they want to get there fast to do it, then a drop down menu is good.
I thought someone might say something like this ;-). Let me explain a little why I think drop-downs are the best option for me, then maybe (hopefully) you can suggest a better solution. I have a small site of about 100 pages. The site provides information about a university department, and this information is very structured. To reflect this structure, different folders and subfolders are used to group similar items. I think the deepest subfolder is about 4 folders down. I want visitors to be able to visualise and have access to the deep folders from the very first page (in fact, from all pages) so that they don't have to navigate to each subfolder's index_html down the tree in order to get the link the next (which would mean following perhaps 4 or 5 links in reality) in order to get to the information they want. [That last sentence was too long ;-)]. I personally like dropdowns in websites, it's just they have a habit of breaking in new versions of browsers. Any comments? tim
Tim Hicks wrote:
Thanks for the pointer. However, as I said in my first post, I've had problems with Hiermenus and Konqueror. At the moment, if I'm going to pay for something, it'll be the Brothercake widget (although I've got a couple of other things to check out).
Ok ... I should have read it closer.
I have a small site of about 100 pages. The site provides information about a university department, and this information is very structured. To reflect this structure, different folders and subfolders are used to group similar items. I think the deepest subfolder is about 4 folders down.
The funny thing is that I have just converted a site of mine using hiermenus and dropdown menus to something using straight html menu's. And everybody was better of doing it. Also the site got much faster ;-) It is a site for a vocational school, and had a structure very similar to the one you describe. The problem is that the users never discivers the index_html files all the way down tha navigational tree. So they lost a lot of information that they needed to understand the page they finally ended up on. They where very fond of a tree structure int the menu's, which I don't like. So we ended up on the following compromise. http://www.itet.ots.dk/ regards Max M The reason I don't reach any higher is that I stand on the shoulders of midgets.
participants (3)
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Max M -
Michael Lewis -
Tim Hicks