Dynamically Conjuring Drop-Down Navigation

by Christian Heilmann

38 Reader Comments

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  1. What is a BFU? And let’s not forget that a lot of alternative User agents do support LINK to start with, and the dropdown only appears when DOM is available. This means that the chances of a User agent creating the dropdown not being able to render it is very slim.

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  2. Opera 7 already has this feature…..

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  3. congratulations for the article.

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  4. i think this is a really cool idea, but the main problem i have with it isn’t the HTML bloating or the non-javascript browsers and whatnot. My question is: don’t browsers preload anything within a link attribute? anything in a link tag will be preloaded because of the html DOM. if there’s a way to turn off that option in the HTML somehow, that would make this much more worthwhile for me. i personally wouldn’t want to link a multitude of documents only to make my visitors wait for them to preload.

    that’s really my one question, unless there’s a way to link to a document that contains all the links, a table of contents or index or sorts…i dunno, my mind is running away with the possibilities.

    (i don’t know if anyone pays attention to these threads anymore, since the article’s a bit old…but there seems to be a tiny issue with spam up there.)

    thanks.

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  5. some browsers may preload certain types of links, but unless the link is something like a stylesheet or a favicon etc… it will not delay the display of the page. but to my knowledge, most will not be preloaded at all.

    i beleive in all newer gecko based browsers you can make the browser preload/prefetch by using:

    <link rel=“prefetch” href=”/foo.html” />

    again, this will not delay the display of the current page. it will be processed after the current page is done displaying.

    heres an nice link

    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefetching_FAQ.html

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  6. I see nothing, and I get several error messages in my Internet Explorer for Mac.

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  7. thanks, very helpful. i might use that with my small site, which is only a few pages really.

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  8. Creatively related (but developed independently):

    http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

    Eric Meyer’s standards-based slide show (11-12/04), like Christian’s drop-down (5/04) splits one page into many “slides” and automatically generates a dropdown menu by which to navigate from one “slide” to another.

    As you might expect, the differences between Eric’s and Christian’s ideas are as interesting as the similarities.

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