Page 4 - Improving the Visual Presentation of a CSS Drop-Down Menu

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Improving the Visual Presentation of a CSS Drop-Down Menu

Welcome to the final installment of the series “Building clean drop-down menus with CSS.” This series shows you how to build an extensible drop-down menu which you can easily include in the existing structure of your own web site. In this part, we'll work on the menu we've created to make it more visually appealing.

Author Info:

By: Alejandro Gervasio

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October 29, 2008

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Improving the Visual Presentation of a CSS Drop-Down Menu - Setting up a working example
(Page 4 of 4 )

As I expressed in the section that you just read, the best way to grasp the logic that drives this highly accessible drop-down menu consists of listing its complete source code. In doing so, you’ll have a much better idea of how it works, and eventually, how it can be improved.

Having said that, here’s the complete definition for the menu in question:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

<title>Example of CSS-based drop-down menu (cross-browser compatible)</title>

<style type="text/css">

/* reset body styles */

body{

padding: 0;

margin: 0;

background: #fff;

}

/* style unordered list */

ul{

padding: 0;

margin: 0;

list-style: none;

}

/* style menu items */

li.topitem{

float: left;

position: relative;

width: 15em;

padding: 5px;

background: #fc0;

font: bold 11px Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

color: #000;

}

/* position and hide drop-down menu */

li.topitem ul{

display: none;

position: absolute;

top: 22px;

left: 0;

background: #ffc;

padding: 5px;

}

li > ul{

top: auto;

left: auto;

}

/* display drop-down menu (add an 'over' class attribute to list items for IE */

li:hover ul,li.over ul{

display: block;

}

#navbar li li a {

font: normal 11px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

color: #000;

padding: 5px;

text-decoration: none;

}

#navbar li li a:hover {

color: #00f;

}

</style>

<script language="javascript">

function initializeDropDownMenu(){

// get 'navbar' element

var navbar=document.getElementById('navbar');

if(!navbar){return};

// get all menu items

var menuitems=navbar.getElementsByTagName('li');

if(!menuitems){return};

for(var i=0;i<menuitems.length;i++){

// assign 'over' class attribute to each menu item on 'mouseover'

menuitems[i].onmouseover=function(){

this.className+=' over';

}

// remove 'over' class attribute to each menu item on 'mouseout'

menuitems[i].onmouseout=function(){

this.className=this.className.replace(' over','');

}

}

}

// initialize drop-down menu when web page is loaded

window.onload=function(){

if(document.all&&document.getElementById&&document.getElementsByTagName){

initializeDropDownMenu();

}

}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<ul id="navbar">

<li class="topitem">About Us

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</body>

</html>

In addition, if the previous source code isn’t simple enough to demonstrate how this menu functions, you may want to download here (link) all of its supporting material, so you can test it with your own browsers.

Final thoughts

Sadly, this is the end of the series. But this isn’t necessarily bad, since hopefully you’re now equipped with the required background to build highly accessible drop-down menus by using the proper combination of well-structured markup, CSS styles and JavaScript.

See you in the next tutorial on web development!

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware.

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