[Zope] OT: drop down menus

[Tim Hicks]

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