I’ve been working with unordered lists as menus for a while now.
The basic concept is you take most – if not all – of the inherent styling from the <ul> to create a basic one tier menu. The trouble then comes when you want to make the menu open out on hover of a node – this requires javascript. I have been playing with building my own menus using jQuery and the code, frankly, was starting to become a tad messy when I got round to adding effects (‘fx’ in jQuery speak).
I had a quick look round the web and found this beauty from twinhelix. I’ve used it a number of times now and with changes to the stylesheets you can make this menu behave and look exactly as you please. It has built in fade/blind effects and the ability to add images to submenus.
The one key advantage.
Accessibility. If you were to have javscript disabled the menu wouldn’t work but what would happen is the <ul> would just render to the page and the menu would still make perfect sense.
Brilliant.
