Topic awaiting preservation: Cross Browser/Frame DHTML Menu

Cross Browser/Frame DHTML Menu
http://www.sothink.com/webtools/dhtmlmenu/index.htm

Samples:
http://www.sothink.com/webtools/dhtmlmenu/store/index.htm

ya...if only JavaScript were still necessary for menus and frames were still necessary period, it'd be a pretty good link

Javascript is still necessary for menus. The well-known CSS hover 'hack' is just dumb and breaks every usability rule in the book.

On the other hand, I doubt that anyone who follows this board will be prepared to pay $35 for it...

?!?

reisio:

shingebis: Why do you say the CSS hover hack is evil ? For instance, the navigation on my site is in CSS and I made a tiny script to patch the flawed support of :hover in IE and keep the markup clean. My site works correctly ( read is easy to browse ) in Lynx, and validates as WAI-AA.

Oh, and obviously flash2005 don't know the crowd of the Asylum.

umm... :hover is not a hack and it doesn't break any "usability rule"s (not that I've ever heard of any such bull)

imo probably the only good uses of JavaScript for menus nowadays is to make Internet Explorer support :hover (assuming you're not into using the very hacky hack that lets you have such a menu work in Internet Explorer with absolutely no JavaScript [neat, but more trouble than it's worth imo]) or to just make the CSS a little more friendly (add a delay before a menu disappears, etc)

Usability isn't just about ensuring things work in Lynx and screen readers. A large chunk of the web-surfing population use IE or Firefox but (unlike us...) don't have 20:20 vision and rock-steady mouse control, and these are the users that suffer with CSS menus. An arthritic grandma surfing Poi's site might take a lot of effort and trial and error to position her mouse pointer over 'releases', and then try to move down to 'Demoscene'... oops, overshot a bit, and now the whole menu's disappeared so we have to start all over again. On every other menu in the world, you'd be able to click on the top-level option and make the menu stick. (OK, almost every other menu. Second-level menus on the Mac don't, and they also annoy me.)

To be fair, the menus on Poi's site are nowhere near as bad as the vertical variety, which hop around as you mouse over the options (and in extreme cases, cause the menu you've just selected to jump out of reach entirely - try hovering over 'Fashion' and then going to 'Restaurants & Bars').

Anyhow, whatever you think of it, it is a hack, because CSS was never meant to control behaviour / actions. If it was, they would have designed it properly with other selectors for clicking, double clicking, keypresses and so on. I just get more and more convinced that :hover is just an out-of-place oddity.

quote:

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shingebis said:

Anarthritic grandma surfing Poi's site might take a lot of effort andtrial and error to position her mouse pointer over 'releases', and thentry to move down to 'Demoscene'... oops, overshot a bit, and now thewhole menu's disappeared so we have to start all over again.

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I mentioned that...

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reisio said:

good uses of JavaScript for menus...(add a delay before a menu disappears, etc)

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...but it's simple enough to make links easy to hit (don't make them tiny and give them some decent 'padding') and have menus not disappear immediately ('padding' again, around the menu for a bit) - hopefully granny (or one of her spawn) have tweaked the browser's font-size setting already, though _and_ of course with CSS you can always just turn it off and have big, unstyled, painfully easy-to-read pages

in short poi's navigation is (some [like you] might say) flawed by design, not by use of CSS instead of JavaScript - a JavaScript-driven menu can easily be just as 'difficult' to use

things like the delayed disappear are still good though, and can work easily with css-driven menus

(Edited by reisio on 04-15-2005 23:26)

shingebis: I agree with everything you said ... at the slight exception of the :hover. This is probably a difference of perception : I consider the hover: as a presentationnal gizmo, not as a behavior. A navigation should work regardless of the CSS or JavaScript or images. With a CSS driven navigation, the navigation remain usable without CSS, while it's rarely the case for JS based navigations.

JavaScript driven navigations are a no-no in term of accessibility, and questionnable in term of usability. Around 11% of the web population have disabled JavaScript.

Btw I complained about, among other things, the usability of "swinging" vertical menus in FireFox & web standards I miss you.

An important thing to consider when designing a site is the target audience. And clearly anarthritic grandmas are not mine
Whatever, I get your point, and like reisio said the persons with visual disabilities have severals means to access the navigation and content. Lynx and accessibility standards compliance *generally* puts the site on the right track to good usability too.