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
<ul>
<li><a href="">Our Staff</a></li>
<li><a href="">Why work with us?</a></li>
<li><a href="">Our profile</a></li>
<li><a href="">More details</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="topitem">Services
<ul>
<li><a href="">Graphic Design</a></li>
<li><a href="">Web Design</a></li>
<li><a href="">Web Programming</a></li>
<li><a href="">Software Development</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="topitem">Products
<ul>
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</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</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!
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