I’ve been spending quite a few hours lately trying to refine a pure CSS flyout menu for a clients website recently. I wanted to use CSS because I didn’t want to mess with the html that the dynamic menu I was using (NAVT) output. So I went with a nice one from CSS play. Nice and basic, pure CSS, even for IE6, although, it required a table to be placed around nested un-numbered lists, which meant screwing around with NAVT PHP, which I wasn’t real keen on. Today I stumbled upon the holy grail. It’s a tidy little htc file with some javascript, that, in short, allows any tag have a hover option within IE6, allowing your nice CSS flyout menus to work in IE6, fantastic stuff. It’s called Whatever:hover and I highly recommend this little gem, it takes the stress out of IE6 optimisation in an XHTML world… wow that was lame.

Predominanty IE6, but IE7 is the still bratty, yet more mature older brother. Pure CSS flyout menus are a beautiful thing, they work, and you can adapt them to anything without having to edit any html. Unless of course you want it to work with IE6. I’m currently building a site for a client that needs to be entirely CMS based, pages, navigation bars, everything. So as I mentioned in an earlier post I’m using Wordpress, along with a very handy sidebar navigation menu called NAVT. A dynamic navigation list plugin that allows you to make a list of links ranging from Wordpress pages, meta links, blog categories and external links, which is great for a Wordpress site that is more a home page than a standard blog. Anyway it uses unordered lists to layout the links and you can nest links underneath other links and whatnot. This made it very easy to make a fully customisable flyout menu that they could add and remove links and pages to without any real hassle. It’s basically all done, except for the IE6 compatibility. I know need to mess around with the NAVT code and place conditional statements in certain spots so that it will work, such fun.  Other than the IE6 debacle, I’m pretty happy with how the site has turned out, and hopefully within the next week or so it will be in the portfolios page.