Which menu techniques to use/avoid?

Hi all.

I've heard tell that one shouldn't use flash or javascript or even
pictures because if someone doesn't have the proper pluggins installed
or turned on they cannot access the navigation system for a given
website.

Just wondering what the current consensus is as far as menu building.

Do you all design for all browsers and situations or just for the the
most common?

Any thoughts?

Thanks, in advance.

JB

JohnB wrote:

> Just wondering what the current consensus is as far as menu building.

A menu isn't a complicated thing. It's a usually one-dimensional list
of a small number of choices. You _can_ represent this as a very simple
piece of HTML, decorated with CSS. By Occam's Razor / KISS then if
that's all you need, that's all you should use.

If you want complicated graphics with Flash, then that's fine too. Make
it as weird and inaccessible as you please, then provide a complete
accessible alternative to it en masse through a separate plain HTML/CSS
menu.

JavaScript is somewhere in the middle. It can't offer as much as Flash.
It rarely provides more than CSS can achieve anyway. What's left for it
to usefully offer? There are some dynamic applications where
JavaScript menus are useful, but they're not common. For nearly all
day-to-day web design, you just don't need it (and thus shouldn't use
it).