After playing with some javascript menus today, I decided to see if I could pull off a drop down menu without any javascript. I’ve seen it done before, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It actually ended up being pretty simple, so I thought I’d share the how-to.
The first thing to do is differentiate the parent menu items from the menu items that only appear after you hover over the parent item. I did this with classes.
<div id="menu"> <ul id="item1"> <li class="top">menu item</li> <li class="item"><a href="#">menu item 1</a></li> <li class="item"><a href="#">menu item 2</a></li> <li class="item"><a href="#">menu item 3</a></li> </ul> </div>
You’ll see the parent item is marked with top, while the rest are marked item. Now I can get to hiding .item and letting .top continue to show. So I’ll add this to the style sheet.
#menu ul .item{display:none;}
And when I hover over the top of the unordered list, I want all list items with class item to appear again. Here’s what I’ll add to the style sheet.
#menu ul:hover .item{display:block;}
You could choose to use display:block or display:inline. The last important piece is the position of the menu.
#menu{position:absolute;}
I wouldn’t say this is necessary, but if you’d like the drop down to appear on top of the content below, it is. Otherwise, your CSS menu will just displace everything underneath it.
Most important of all, this is all web standards compliant, and keeps the HTML of the page beautiful. I’ve tested it successfully in Camino 1.5.1, Firefox 2.0.0.9, and Safari 3.0.3. If you’d like test it anywhere and see how it fairs, go for it.