Suggestions? Need 4-5 Tier Menu or Navigation Bar

Web Site Navigation for MANY MANY Links

[Paul Woodley]

I have a site that needs 4 Levels of Sub-Menus break out of 1 Link. Kinda like a JS Pulldown Menu that keeps on breaking out till the .htm page is found (the last one)
Though I know of 1-2 Level Menus that exist like the ones on dynamicdrive.com what are people here doing when they realize you need somethin like this represented in the (Navigation) Menu?:

PLANET->EARTH->CONTINENT->COUNRTY->STATE

Or even more...

->CITY->ZIPCODE->STREET

Anything out there that is userfriendly and looks good?

-Paul

[tedster]

One way to go is the cascade, or tree-style expanding menu. Some resources in this thread [webmasterworld.com].

[Paul Woodley]

Thanks Tedster. I had seen that style before. It works but not too,er, pretty. (-:
I was thinking more of a DHTML Cascading style with on mouseover drop downs rather than clicks.

Thanks for the look out though!

-PW

[Emmanuel Schneiter]

Paul,

Could you please let me know wether you found anything (and where) that allowed you to build 3-4 levels cascading menus ?

Thanks.

Emmanuel

[Paul Woodley]

Emanuel..
I did find this useful. Does what I need it to thought doesn't work with onmouseover!

[developer.netscape.com...]

There is an Onmouseover one that does work that I really like but it it slow (great for smaller indexes) at [webreference.com...] called DTHML HierMenu

Hope these help!

[BoneHeadicus]

The best tool for this is DMB [software.xfx.net].

[austtr]

I saw one of these multi-level cascading menu systems used on a USA regional/county destination guide about 6 months ago .... don't remember which one or the URL.

What I do remember is that it was hopelessly slow.. it killed the site stone dead. It was as about as useful as mammaries on a male bovine.

[BoneHeadicus]

They are very heavy indeed...most of the ones I've done are 30K+.

They are extremely cool tho;)

[Emmanuel Schneiter]

I have just come across another site (I wasn't even looking for this anymore) that provides some Java script code for muli-level cascading menu. Small and easy code as well as a nice result...
Have look on [javascript.internet.com...]

[tedster]

Thanks for that, Emmanuel. And welcome to the WebmasterWorld forums. As a javascript nut, I'm glad to see someone else who pokes around through the online js resources.

One or two caveats about this particular script -- it is MSIE only, and it uses both document.layers and document.all, neither of which made in into the next set of W3C standards.

So, document.layers is already unsupported by Netscape 6 (this script will fail on that browser) and I have doubts that Explorer 6, due later this year, will support document.all -- something to consider before building such a menu into a site you are developing today.

[chiyo]

Thanks for the heads up Tedster. Both our menus and news tickers use document.all and document.layers. They were cross browser at least in Nestcape 4 and IE 5 and worked well for 2 years.

This is very bad news, but I guess we have to start looking for alternatives now.

[tedster]

Yeah, I've got lots of js code out there to overhaul, and I'm struggling a bit with it. Already getting Netscape 6 hits that I know are failing. Some of the functionality may just have to go (tears fall).

Anyway, here's the Netscape page [sites.netscape.net] with at least some helpful advice.

One of the common ways these two properties have been used is simply to do browser detection. The rest of the functioning code may not use them at all, and that's good. All we need to do is create a more standards compliant sniffer in those cases.