Seems there is a bit of a hoo-har about making nice dropdown menus since most recent article on ALA which has got Zeldman started on about how he hates drop downs anyway but supports the right to rant about them. There does seem to be some empirical evidence to support the idea that dropdowns are bad UI design, but try telling that to a designer.
This is all fine and dandy since I woke up this morning and decided to solve all my CSS dropdown problems once and for all. So I’ve been researching and this is what I’ve found:
- There’s mention of some Dutch dude who has a pair but bugger me if I can read Dutch. Works in everything except IE/Mac (bain-of-my-facking-exsistence). So no good :(
- There are better suckerfish menu’s avalable now, which I originaly gave up on because of IE/Mac problems. Still no work in IE/Mac but offers a dubious solution.
- Whatever I come up with, I’d like to intergrate it with the sexy sliding menus. Pitty they don’t use CSS for positioning.
- Finaly there is the XHTML/CSS/DHTML Semantically Correct Drop-Down Menu v1.1 which I have been using thus far but have done something to the CSS that makes it wig out on Safari 1.2 and quite frankly I’m over it.
Hey Al, told you I read your blog. Have you been to Quirksmode? Probably a little rudimentary for your needs, but he does have a nice div-slider script (in javascript->DHTML->sticky Menu) which is totally basic, but provides a good starting point for ’sexy sliding menus’. It only moves the div, you have to write your own ’sex-it-up’ code for movement acceleration and decelleration. Only problem? IE Mac of course. But you could just use position: fixed; if a mac is detected and something else in other cases.