[thelist] DHTML Drop-Down Tip

Richard Bennett richard.bennett at skynet.be
Wed Feb 5 22:34:13 CST 2003


Hi,
<----- Original Message -----
<From: "Brothercake" <cake at brothercake.com>
<I'm the author of http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/topmen3/
<FYI - topmenu 3 offers much wider browser support, is more stable in 4-
<version browsers, and is more finely configurable.

Nice menu.

> Joshua Olson <joshua at waetech.com>
> > http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/topmen4/

Also a nice menu.
Did you however take note that it was not free if you're developing websites
professionally?
http://www.milonic.co.uk/menu/reqlic.php

The main problem with both above menus is that they are not search-engine
friendly. (to say nothing of them not being accessible, not working with
Javascript disabled etc etc)

If you decide to use a menu like this, you should include the same links as
it uses between <noscript> tags - these will then allow search-engines to
spider your site.
Take for instance the v3 msdn-clone example:
http://brothercake.com/dropdown/msdn.html

A search-engine (or pda/mobile/screenreader/nonJavascript etc) visiting this
page sees none of the links, and can't crawl the site:
http://gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?q=brothercake.com/dropdown/msdn.h
tml

The only two links that show are to the .js file, and a .gif.

By comparison a similar menu discussed by Stephen Taylor in his evolt.org
article performs much better in that regard:
The menu:
http://evolt.org/evolt/files/54210/54234/micone.htm

links found:
http://gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?q=evolt.org/evolt/files/54210/542
34/micone.htm

The article:
http://evolt.org/article/A_Corporate_Redesign_Part_I/17/54234/index.html

Personally that looks like a more interesting solution, given a little
work...

Richard.




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