G'day Jay,
I've heard the request for pure CSS drop-down menus quite a lot, and
rarely see people getting told what they should about how *bad* they
are.
CSS is designed as a method for styling visible items and laying them
out relative to one-another. Drop-down menus are behavioural, and
thus should be taken care of with Javascript (not Java; there's a
huge difference, worth noting). Of course, accessibility means
keeping in place a series of fall-backs which allow non-JS enabled
users to view the list.
There are some massive accessibility gains that Javascript drop-downs
provide:
• You can animate opening and closing lists (not just eye-candy; it
makes it very clear to the user when there is a change on the screen)
• You can provide a suitable pause before the list collapses (your
users are not necessarily skilled with a mouse or keyboard. They may
have difficulty operating a mouse and I can tell you from experience
that they have real difficulty changing movement from horizontal
(along your list headings) to vertical (down your first level list
items) to horizontal (across the list item to the sublist) to
vertical again (down the sublist items) without accidentally moving
the mouse out of the bounds of the list item. Javascript menus
introduce a delay before actions are cancelled so that a slight
movement of the cursor outside the bounds of a list item is not
penalised against)
• You can get identical behaviour in all the major browsers (all the
CSS-only drop-down menus rely on CSS hackery to work properly in IE.
Every sensible browser can handle the ul>li selector; the basis of a
simple, standards-based CSS solution, but IE doesn't. CSS hackery is
no better for you as someone who doesn't understand JS but does
understand CSS than JS hackery; CSS hacks commonly *don't make
sense*. They're backward thinking and complex to write).
Please, for your users' sake: use a Javascript drop down menu (but
make sure it's one that is fully accessible, and that reverts to a
pure-CSS menu when JS is not available). I use TwinHelix Designs'
excellent FreeStyle Menus (http://www.twinhelix.com/dhtml/fsmenu/)
personally, but it's donationware for commercial use.
Cheers,
Kit
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