[thelist] how to handle menu weight?

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>i'd like to solicit some feedback about menu weight. . .
>
>our current site is about 450 pages. it currently uses the famed
>dhtmlcentral.com hiermenus.

Are all these 450 pages in the menu?

>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. . .

Do it! Well, that's more easily said than done, but it would be a good
solution. Hiermenus is just so baaaad...

>am i worrying too much about menu weight with this audience? are my menu
>sizes out of line for my site size? any comments on this? any urls to
>consult?

Personally I think all these hiermenu-like scripts are totally and hideously
bloated. The reason, I think, is the completely unnecessary object-oriented
approach that makes the code swell and swell and swell.

I wrote a hiermenus-like script myself that was 7K, I expect it to grow to
about 10K, but not much more. Compare this to Hiermenu's 44-51 K.

If you're interested, it's at http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/ppknav.html but
it's in beta because I'm not yet content with the script as it is, it has a
nasty bug in IE4 and I don't give any support, so basically you're on your
own <g>.

The Help Me bit below on the page is current and correct, BTW, try including
the JS file in your pages and see what happens. You can of course mail me
the result, but I don't promise I'll do something with it right away, I'm
busy with other things.

Feel free to take my code and do anything you like with it. If it really
works and you're really happy with it, please send me a URL.

ppk

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