[thelist] how to handle menu weight?

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Mon Apr 8 12:56:00 CDT 2002


> From: Fortune Elkins <fortune_elkins at summithq.com>
[...]
> our current site is about 450 pages. it currently uses the famed
> dhtmlcentral.com hiermenus. i have to remake this site and would like
> to ditch the hiermenus because of the new licensing fee -- very high.
> my audience is a corporate T1 NT or Windows 2000 audience, except for
> some latin american clients who are sun 2.6, netscape 4, at about 64.

what can you tell us about their processors?  for instance, i
recently implemented a DHTML-powered menuing system on an
intranet, and while it allows users to get to *any* page on the site
from any other page (ugh), it also means that it takes a lot longer
to render the menus than they'd like...

rendering time is a big factor, since it does affect overall page
perceived download...  even if you tell the user the page came
down in 2 seconds, if it took another 10 seconds to render all the
widgets, it's a 12 second d/l from the user's perspective...

> the current hiermenus all total weigh in at about 45 to 52k, depending
> on the users DOM. i've looked at a java applet -- about 35-40k.
> drawbacks are obvious. there are the FW4 menus, which would come out
> to about 40-45k. i built some very pretty css-based al sparber
> projectseven.com type dhtml menus, but they come out to about 50k!
> <sigh>. i'd like to just stuff these menus into an ssi. . .
[...]

how about a linked JS file?  hiermenus do that, so you load up the
array once, and ideally it stays cached for your entire visit...




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