rMenu Trials

rMenu is starting to really shape up. Give it a try in your browser of choice and let me know. I know that Netscape 6 doesn’t work and IE 7 beta 2 still has a couple really stupid jogging/ghost bugs. I’ll iron those out (I hope). For the brave, here is the css.

The big hang-up I’ve been having is getting the right-aligned menu children to dropdown right-aligned to the parent. Today I deleted all the CSS I had to handle the dropdown positioning and started over from scratch. That seems to have helped a bit.

Not sure what I think about the image used to signify a menu will expand on right-aligned vertical menus. What do you think?

The current CSS allows menus to go 3 levels deep. After that the expand images will get goofy and IE will stop displaying menus alltogether. This is because you need to keep adding markup to support each level of depth you want in your menu. It’s silly but if you want IE 6 and earlier to work you have to do this.

My mind begins to go crazy when I think about trying to mix vertical and horizontal menus outside of the top-level menu. Horizontal dropdowns? Would/should they work? Probably, haven’t tested yet, mainly because I know it’ll reveal problems that I’ll have to work out. But if you want a menu structure similar to what’s up there now, it’ll do it.

Why not dropup menus? In theory it should work. I might try that at some point as well just for completeness.

So there you go. Enjoy. And remember, rMenu is still a work in progress. YMMV!

Wikipedia

Wikipedia. I like it. I love the Wiki concept and I love the amount of information that’s up there on Wikipedia already. Part of me doesn’t like the chaotic nature of the more controversial subjects but another part of me thinks that sort of chaos is really interesting and worth allowing.

But there’s one thing I really hate. Try doing a text search with your browser via the search hotkey. You can’t. Why? Because the letter F is the access key for the search field. So anytime you type control-f or option-f or whatever, the search box does not appear but rather the site search field gains focus. Very annoying. But also an interesting case for accessibility. Perhaps using accesskeys requires a bit of forethought? As a web page/site designer do you ignore key browser hotkeys and assign them to page objects or do you work around the issue by intentionally not using those specific hotkeys?

I am still around

Just a bit busy right now. My boss left and I’ve taken on a bit of his workload and that’s keeping me extremely busy.

At the moment I’m not doing much of anything although I am toying with the idea of submitting a redesign of Slashdot.

Much like Zen Garden you can only manipulate the CSS and not really touch the HTML.

My perspective on this is that radical redesigns are out and simple cleanup of the interface and overall look is the best way to go about this one. I figure with millions of daily users (users who have been there for years) suddenly changing the entire interface would be a little bit of a shock. What I’m looking at is turning the left column menus into a horizontal drop-down menu and to narrow the right column to free up some horizontal space to allow for more content to fit on a single page. Maybe provide a few bits of graphical treatment (gray lines, borders around blocks, etc…) but nothing extreme.

And anyone is free to use and abuse any work or ideas I throw out and enter the contest themselves. I’m not even sure if I’ve got time to construct something before this Friday.