|
modest_menus:Overview|
modest_menus:Detailed Description:selected|
modest_menus:Download|
modest_menus:Documentation
As many web designers and developers know, there are
tons of menuing systems available either for free or for sale on
the web. So, why does the world need yet one more? Each system
seems to have its own strengths and weaknesses which make it better
for some projects and not others. ModestMenus is no exception.
It was intentionally created from the outset with certain design
differences in mind that make it best suited for very specific
purposes. Is ModestMenus right for you? Here's an overview of how
this system is generally different from many others:
- Lightweight ModestMenus is lightweight in two
senses — filesize and featureset. ModestMenus does not,
by default, provide you with many of the bells and whistles
available in alternative systems. The menus don't have
drop shadows, and they don't fade into and off of the screen.
In fact, ModestMenus doesn't offer any sort of special F/X
when appearing and disappearing. This is the "modest" aspect
of the name. As a result, the amount of code that's loaded
into each page using the menu system is much smaller than
many other menu systems that offer all the graphical bells
and whistles.
- Cross-browser/Cross-platform As of the
latest version of ModestMenus, there are no known browser- or
platform-specific usability issues, provided that the user's
browser has the ability to render CSS 1.0 or newer and
JavaScript 1.0 or newer. ModestMenus has been successfully used
in numerous live sites (including this one) with tens of thousands
of unique site visitors sucessfully navigating sites through them.
This means that the site coder doesn't have to spend tons of time
tweaking their menus to make sure they actually work on their
site visitors' computers. On a sidenote, if you've run into
problems with other menuing systems not being able to
accurately display over Flash animations on Internet Explorer,
you'll be happy to know that's not an issue with ModestMenus.
- Versatile One of the most substantial ideological
differences between ModestMenus and many other menu systems on
the market, is the concept of what exactly a menu is and what
can trigger it. Simply put, in the ModestMenus system, a menu
is any grouped collection of links and their labels that can
either be displayed or hidden depending on whether their trigger
was activated. The first major advantage to this method is that
you can implement menus in many more ways than is often possible
with other menuing systems, because any HTML element that
supports an onMouseOver or onClick event, can become the trigger
for a ModestMenu (i.e. <a>, <applet;>, <button>,
<div>, <img>, <input>, <li>, <object>,
<p>, and much more). The second major advantage to this
method is that menus exist as separate, re-usable entities
outside of their triggers. This means that, for example,
completely separate elements on your screen can trigger the
exact same menu — you create and name your menu once and then
trigger it however, wherever, and whenever you want.
- CSS-Driven To a certain degree all
menuing systems are "CSS-driven." They all use various aspects
of CSS to organize and display or hide the menus. What makes
ModestMenus different is that it uses pure CSS to define almost
everything about how the menus and menu elements should be
displayed. Before you can start using many other menuing systems
you first have to learn the menu system's proprietary code and
syntax to do things like add borders, change colors, set spacing,
and generally define what a menu looks like. The assumption of
ModestMenus is that you, the person creating the website, already
know how to write CSS. (Or, if you don't, that it won't be a
problem to learn the basics very quickly.) To ask you to learn
some arbitrary commands and code to do what you already know how
to do in CSS seems counterproductive. So, ModestMenus
completely exposes the style definitions to you in a standard
CSS file that lets you use the knowledge you already have to
get up and running quicker.
To download the latest version of ModestMenus, click
here.
|
|
