Dropdown menus are part of the web gesalt... moveover, part of the computing gesalt since the first Macintosh computer ushered in the Graphic User Interface. However, accessible and clean dropdown menus were, for many years, dodgy at best... IE would display it differently from Firefox, while Safari or Opera would have some weird flicker. Even when they all looked and behaved correctly, people with mobile devices or screen-readers (at best) would have painfully un-readable content at the top of their page were the menu was supposed to be.
Smartdrop addresses these issues head on. Smartdrop is a lightweight, but extremely flexible CSS and Javascript-based dropdown menu system, that works across the board in modern (and not-so-modern) browsers, is accessible to screen-readers for the vision-impared. Best yet, it degrades beautifully if Javascript is disabled or not available. No ugly code that does nothing if your visitor doesn't have Javascript on.
Requirements
- A positioned (relative or absolute in CSS) container with a designer assigned ID (for each dropdown)
- A link within that container (representing the primary, or top level navigation)
- The Smartdrop package, with one file (menu.js) customized to contain the hierarchy of the menus and another (menu.css) customized to the look and feel of the site style and color scheme
Who Made It?
Keith Gibbs, Alembic Laboratories' lead developer, with a little help from his colleague at Boston University, Jon Zeppieri.
Where to Get It?
Right here, for free (courtesy of the LGPL license).