Javascript Dhtml Hierarchical Menus Some Options

Now that the Webreference

Hierarchical menus have gone commercial, it is time for some of us to consider

good alternatives for developing those DHTML drop-down menus.

In this quick

posting (hesitate to dignify this as an "article"), I will share some

options from my stash, with some relevant preliminary comments. This is not supposed to

be TheGreatComparisonOfMenuScripts or a comprehensive rehash of search results from

Google... it is just a listing of possible options that I have accumulated on

my local drive. Hope this is useful.

Before we begin, I have tested these menu scripts with the following browsers

using a Windows XP build 2600 and a Windows 2000 box —

• IE 4x - 6x
• Netscape 4.77
• Netscape 6.2
• Mozilla 0.9.8 (Mozilla/5.0; Gecko/20020204)
• Opera 6.01 Build 1014

Ok, here's the list:

Name	Sample	Browsers it works with	Remarks
Milonic	Get code	All tested.	This one is perhaps the simplest to start coding with, appears the same in all browsers, and has a cool fading effect. Should be seen.
Dynamic Drive	Get code	Claims to work with all, but does not even show up in Opera.	I discarded this particular one because it does not work in Opera 6. They have a whole category of menus though.
Bratta.com (DHTML Central)	Get code	All tested.	He has a bunch of examples out too. May I draw your attention to a menu with a valid XHTML DTD. (His advanced examples are a little quirky with NN4 and Opera though).
BrainJar.com	Get code	Acts unstably in Opera and goes absolutely kaput in NN 4.77.	Greatly done script (and DOM viewer, which you must see if you are a JS coder) but I would like to have had Netscape 4.77 support. If you don't care about old Netscapes, this is one of the best there is.
ProjectSeven (Tutorial to make menus with their Macromedia Dreamweaver Extensions)	Get code	All tested.	They offer some cool extensions to Dreamweaver. Note, however, that you can use this only if you use DW, and you have Macromedia Extensions Manager installed.
WebFX "XMenu"	Get code	Doesn't work in Netscape. Any Netscape. The website is honest enough to claim so.	Hmm.
Flash	Get code	All tested.	Er...and the problem is? ;-)

That's it. Would love to hear other options, and how these above suggestions

fare on Mac and Unix machines.

-Shashank

(shanx@shanx.com)