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An ACTUAL Pure CSS drop down menu (cross browser as well)

grc.com — So far, this is the only one I've ever found that actually works. The link is to the style sheet only, that's all you need. For a demo of it actually working, go to: http://www.grc.com/menu2/invitro.htm Test it in your favorite (or least favorite) browser.

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  • crawf061, on 11/28/2007, -5/+102linkage to the demo: http://www.grc.com/menu2/invitro.htm
    • rasterbator, on 11/28/2007, -6/+14Digg the hell out of this thing. Steve Gibson and the Security Now podcast team deserve the extra hits on their site!
    • andrew522, on 11/28/2007, -1/+9you appealed to my laziness by saving me the effort of copying and pasting that link from the description.
  • MikeonTV, on 11/28/2007, -24/+13Hopefully it can hit the front page too. We all know that this is the only way to find CSS templates. Too bad there isn't a some sort of engine we could use to search for ways to design our websites. You have saved me countless hours at my public library.
    • neoneddy, on 11/28/2007, -2/+31I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not.
    • j4200, on 11/28/2007, -3/+12If I wanted to use Google to find everything I would. Sometimes I prefer to go to places where people have recommended what is good and it gets talked about. Take the antisocial approach to learning the tricks of the website building trade if you want. Bear in mind though, learning seems a hell of a lot easier if you have plenty of people to trade your tricks with.
      • MikeonTV, on 11/28/2007, -4/+2Come on j4200 this is the second CSS drop down to hit the front page in 7 hours.
  • neoneddy, on 11/28/2007, -6/+53this is nice, but I prefer suckerfish menus because it uses clean xhtml, not this conditional table crap, I guess pick your poison, suckerfish JS, or this and all these goofy IF statements. I like cleaner code myself.
    • bdurkin, on 11/28/2007, -19/+10Do you work for Micro$oft? This is some clean code if you ask me. This was obviously created with speed in mind and was created for the generic web browser standards and then tweaked (very little I may add) for IE6. Are you some kind of JS fanboy or something?
    • Kershoc, on 11/28/2007, -1/+10And don't forget the best thing about Suckerfish (and its kids). The JS is only needed for IE6 so you can serve that up in Conditional Comments and not even bother the rest of the browsers with it.
      • rasterbator, on 11/28/2007, -7/+4The reason GRC does not use JavaScript is because of the security vulnerabilities. And if you do not know what the security issues are with JavaScript (in ANY browser), then you need to listen to the Security Now podcast. There is good reason to avoid JavaScript on your pages. That said, it is near impossible not to use JavaScript these days.
        • nihlton, on 11/28/2007, -3/+1either you or i don't understand the javascript security vulnerabilities.

          isn't the danger from javascript OUTSIDE your website? Its not dangerous that you have javascript on your site, but rather that other people have javascript on THEIR site which attacks yours. The solution is not to develop without javascript - innocuous javascript is innocuous javascript. If you're paranoid, turn javascript off in your browser.
    • bhowell, on 11/28/2007, -2/+10Aye, and shouldn't we care more about the usability of the menus than their implementation? It's in CSS.. that's great, but it suffers from the same usability problems that the cascading menus of yore did... If your mouse strays one pixel outside of the menu, it disappears and you have to go back and reopen it. When you're opening a submenu, you have to follow a small "tunnel" (the text of the current selection) into the submenu.

      Microsoft worked around these problems by using delays. Linux and Apple make it so you can move the mouse directly to a submenu item without following the "tunnel." If you try to do either of those with CSS, you're more insane than the person who created pure CSS menus :p

      CSS is very useful, but be careful of evangelizing a technology -- it's not healthy.
      • macoafi, on 11/29/2007, -0/+2CSS has better usability than JS. JS should never be relied upon. Still though, I wonder how they made li:hover work in IE6. IE6 doesn't recognize :hover on anything but links. You'd need to have it load a behavior (IE6 can use a loaded behavior for hover since it already understands hover, just needs to be taught that things other than links can do it)
    • koick, on 11/29/2007, -5/+1If statements?! Last time I checked, CSS wasn't a programming language...
      • koick, on 11/29/2007, -1/+4Nevermind, I just looked at the page sourcecode and saw the hacked up html comments. Go ahead, bury me for being stupid.
      • therightclique, on 11/29/2007, -3/+2i'm pretty sure you don't know what "programming language" means.
    • willynilly, on 11/29/2007, -1/+3WTF is Suckerfish?

      Great how everyone refers to it and nobody posts a link.
      • fredclown, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3It's on A List Apart's website. Google suckerfish. You'll find it. And if you REALLY need the link here it is.

        http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dropdowns/
      • insub2, on 12/01/2007, -0/+2Seriously?
        You are sitting in front of a computer connected to the most extensive collection of information humans have ever known. Do you know how to use it?

        Hint: Google is your friend.
    • insub2, on 12/01/2007, -0/+1....wrong spot. sry.
  • KnightMareInc, on 11/28/2007, -6/+1ofn but many many months
  • objectcode, on 11/28/2007, -5/+3great
  • Tserk, on 11/28/2007, -3/+14Suckerfish seems more grokable to me.
  • BigBrother87, on 11/28/2007, -5/+41I love you GRC. While you're there, check out grc.com/passwords for Steve's Even More Perfect Paper Passwords. And SpinRite. And Shields Up. And the podcast with Leo Laporte. And the million other free and unique utilities. I guess I'm a bit of a fanboy.
    • greven, on 11/28/2007, -2/+10Hells ya. Never considered being a gibson fanboy, but I would classify myself as such. Security now 4 life
  • thorbergdt, on 11/28/2007, -16/+30Yeah super......only 275+ lines of code for a simple drop down box... kinda defeats the purpose.
    • headzoo, on 11/28/2007, -2/+25I thought the purpose was to create drop down menus, that will work on any browser, and without JavaScript. So how does this defeat the purpose?
    • koick, on 11/29/2007, -2/+3Thousands of man hours spent coming up with standardized tags and ways of displaying them, and then Microsoft goes and blows it off... kinda defeats the purpose.
  • homesqua, on 11/28/2007, -1/+29damn that's a long css file for a simple drop down
    • skankyBacon, on 11/28/2007, -1/+13That's the price you pay for full browser compatibility.
      • koick, on 11/29/2007, -3/+3DUUUUDE, if you are still using IE5, you are a major looser and need to freak'n upgrade to one of the many free and much better alternatives. Website designers need not worry about people using such old browsers.
        • macoafi, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3er...but IE6 is el sucko too
        • skankyBacon, on 12/06/2007, -0/+1Yes, but stupid people spend money too, and it's just as green as smart people's money.
    • Derrekito, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3So if we take out all the IE6 crap, then how long is it? ;)
    • svivian, on 11/30/2007, -0/+1http://www.digg.com/microsoft/Digg_this_if_you_re_ ...
  • doktorzee, on 11/28/2007, -15/+1Didn't someone just post a pure css dropdown menu thing today or yesterday? Why this? Burried for dup.
  • ramow, on 11/28/2007, -21/+2Thank you so much, It was super helpful for me.

    Check out my drop down menu at: http://rami.mawas.googlepages.com/
    It is a javascript one.

    http://rami.name/
    • yogiri, on 11/28/2007, -1/+1You should check some javascript framework with animation functions. If you use JS, you can make a lot more things to make it look nicer. Anyway, it works, so it's ok.
    • beastlykings, on 11/29/2007, -0/+1Dude, its borked for me. The menu's hide behind the flash thing.
      I have the same problem at walmart.com, its that way on both my computers (Ubuntu 6.06/7.10).
      http://i7.tinypic.com/867aq0i.png
  • testerburner, on 11/28/2007, -4/+14No Javascript solution - this is a good basis for customizing your own drop down menu, and if you listen to Security Now, Steve actually mentions that members of his newsgroup actually tested and helped developed the drop down solution.

    Thumbs up for Steve Gibson, Spinrite and GRC!
  • hotpepper, on 11/28/2007, -18/+8People still use dropdown menus?
  • tehnico, on 11/28/2007, -0/+13Don't care for the wrapping around the submenus. Use the csshover.htc script to add li:hover functionality to IE5+6 and you can eliminate all that conditional table crap, and half the css. Perfectly legit to do so and keeps the script much more inline with proper coding techniques.

    But neat submenu. Definitely better then that piece of crap from before.
  • mariachi, on 11/28/2007, -6/+2meh
  • PhrosTT, on 11/28/2007, -5/+11i'll 15 lines of javascript instead. k thx.
  • jaylittle, on 11/28/2007, -18/+4Seriously? Anybody who buys into the garbage that Steve Gibson produces needs to be shot. That CSS contains massive amounts of absolute positioning. Not to mention that nearly everything else he has produced is a fraud. Take Spinrite. He made all of the technical terms in his manual for it up. Spinrite does nothing. The program is nothing more than a DOS GUI interface that reads some information about your drive using BIOS calls. It can't possibly due half of what it claims it can do based on the sole fact that it is a DOS program relying upon BIOS calls as it requires no device drivers of any sort.
    Read the manual for Spinrite and engage your brain. Gibson is fraud.
    Check out his rants years ago about DDOS attacks and the release of Windows XP. He claimed that because Windows XP contained raw socket capabilities, it's release would herald the end of the internet. 6 years later and it's still trucking. God forbid Gibson retract his garbage though.
    He has been wrong at nearly every single point of his career, but people put the blinders on for this guy and refuse to accept it. It's sad and pathetic. It is high time that Steve Gibson be shut down once and for all.
    Step #1 to accomplishing this is to stop giving this idiot any attention at all.
    • pseudojd, on 11/28/2007, -0/+6You, clearly are not a Steve Gibson fanboy.
    • OscaronV1, on 11/28/2007, -0/+8I, and the 2 dozen hard drives I've fixed that were non operable before running SpinRite on them, respectfully disagree with you.
    • skankyBacon, on 11/28/2007, -0/+2"He made all of the technical terms in his manual for it up."

      An excellent example of "WTF Grammar."
      http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive ...
    • Kular, on 11/29/2007, -0/+3Yes good thing MS left Raw sockets in Windows too..... oh wait they took it out because it was so broken...
      As for Spinerite I'm sure you've actually bought a copy and done a very thorough amount of testing on it so I will trust you that it doesn't work and not the hundreds of paying customers who say it does...
    • MirandaJanell, on 11/29/2007, -0/+6Why would SpinRite need device drivers? Steve Gibson writes everything at a low level. Standard interfaces make the current state of SpinRite possible. As far as it's implementation in DOS is concerned, big whoop, because it uses DOS it's bad?

      Raw sockets in windows xp. Yeah they were disabled. You try and create a raw socket using the microsoft api in an updated version of windows xp. Good luck to you. Steve Gibson will never "retract his garbage" because some group at Microsoft clearly agrees with his garbage.

      Honestly I think you're the one with blinders on. I don't blindly follow everything that Steve says, but the guy makes great points, and I'm more apt to listen to him than some Gibson hater who can't get the facts straight.
  • michaelkpate, on 11/28/2007, -7/+1http://digg.com/programming/Javascript_free_CSS_ba ...
  • jaylittle, on 11/28/2007, -21/+2Seriously? Anybody who buys into the garbage that Steve Gibson produces needs to be shot. That CSS contains massive amounts of absolute positioning. Not to mention that nearly everything else he has produced is a fraud. Take Spinrite. He made all of the technical terms in his manual for it up. Spinrite does nothing. The program is nothing more than a DOS GUI interface that reads some information about your drive using BIOS calls. It can't possibly due half of what it claims it can do based on the sole fact that it is a DOS program relying upon BIOS calls as it requires no device drivers of any sort.

    Read the manual for Spinrite and engage your brain. Gibson is a fraud.

    Check out his rants years ago about DDOS attacks and the release of Windows XP. He claimed that because Windows XP contained raw socket capabilities, it's release would herald the end of the internet. 6 years later and it's still trucking. God forbid Gibson retract his garbage though.

    He has been wrong at nearly every single point of his career, but people put the blinders on for this guy and refuse to accept it. It's sad and pathetic. It is high time that Steve Gibson be shut down once and for all.

    Step #1 to accomplishing this is to stop giving this idiot any attention at all.
    • OscaronV1, on 11/28/2007, -0/+4I, and the 2 dozen hard drives I've fixed that were non operable before running SpinRite on them, respectfully disagree with you.

      Dupe comment on a dupe comment.
  • stutimandal, on 11/28/2007, -0/+4Dropdown menus are somewhat old now. Enlarge on Hover seems to be the latest favorite.
  • Azdak, on 11/28/2007, -0/+8nice...i'll be using this.

    does anybody else find it funny that any time "Steve Gibson" or GRC" is even whispered, the whole thing turns into a Spinrite infomercial?

    no hate, just noticing :D
    • koick, on 11/29/2007, -0/+1Agreed. I'm "just noticing" too that on Monday, June 7th, 2004 SpinRite 6.0 was released yet he STILL only has version 5 documentation up...
  • nihlton, on 11/28/2007, -0/+5another vote for suckerfish here
    with each primary menu in its own UL outside a primary UL, they are each semantically unrelated. not a huge deal, but bad practice.
    also, ill take conditional javascript and clean markup over conditional table hacks anyday. In the end, this is a hack. impressive, but a hack.
  • pocknin, on 11/28/2007, -1/+2Why would someone choose conditional, unmaintainable HTML over a simple ul/li list with a tad of javascript is beyond me, irrespective of whether it's standard compliant or not. If you have access to jQuery you could produce a menu, with no limit to how many levels deep it goes, in about 6 lines of code...

    If not, Suckerfish FTW.
    • osbjmg, on 11/29/2007, -0/+2You don't have to use Javascript. I'm guessing the angle is to be more secure.
  • lscritch, on 11/28/2007, -0/+4I'm not a Gibson hater like some, but I have to wonder, if this thing is so great, why doesn't he use it on his own site?
    Plus it depends on invalid CSS.
  • sherakama, on 11/28/2007, -0/+1I really like this model. You have to leave in style sheet comments though.
    http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/dd_valid.html
    I was even able to create image rollovers using css.
    • warbastard, on 11/28/2007, -1/+0agreed, its really easy to use and flexible enough to do some pretty wicked things with. Conditional comments arent that bad, the way Stu does it is as minimal as possible
  • dieseltravis, on 11/28/2007, -0/+1How about some Strict XHTML instead of the Transitional tag soup?
    and then how about some valid CSS?

    I'll stick with the semantic markup in the suckerfish/jquery version I'm using now, thanks.
  • Jebus, on 11/28/2007, -0/+1Does anyone have anything good / bad to say about this ( ignoring price ): http://www.smartmenus.org ?
    I know it's not pure CSS but it certainly is functional and degrades very well.
    • AvengeX, on 11/29/2007, -0/+1The "D" in DHTML stands for *dirty*.
  • Travisx2, on 11/29/2007, -3/+1Ugh.. we are digging grc... Steve's gonna be pissed.
  • doshindude, on 11/29/2007, -9/+1Who else thought this was gonna be a widget for Counter-Strike Source?
    ...'cuz I did.....
  • Kular, on 11/29/2007, -1/+5For those who don't listen to Security now or take the time to look it up. The whole point of this is that there is NO java script in it. Steve is very anti-scripting as most browser hacks today exploit scripting errors. This is just his proof of concept that you can do great menu's without using JavaScript... Personally I agree its too much effort and could care less if Joe idiot gets infected because of bad JavaScript on a website or ad.
  • normalize, on 11/29/2007, -1/+5Well, it still doesn't work in lynx...
  • thanethane, on 11/29/2007, -4/+1It's also flawed. No matter where I click (Firefox) I get the same default news and views page. Perhaps it's the add blocking?
    • dmland, on 11/29/2007, -3/+0It seems to exist mainly as a link farm to promote his software. It's not that clever, it's not at all clean, and it has the stink of linkspam on it.
  • bcarl314, on 11/29/2007, -0/+1I don't know, I've used so many drop downs now, it seems like there's always some hang up. It's Javascript, it's CSS, it's 50k, it 2 lines, bottom line is it seems like the best options are some of the more popular ones like http://www.udm4.com, suckerfish, oepncube, etc.

    People will be trying to re-invent this wheel for years to come.
  • sarken, on 11/29/2007, -1/+2Steve Gibson always keeps things simple. That is why he is the best.
    • dmland, on 11/29/2007, -2/+0I guess I don't consider nearly 300 lines of CSS plus layer upon layer of dreadful non-semantic conditional markup to be "simple".
  • hysterix, on 11/29/2007, -9/+1This is stupid, unnecessary, and is not not or innovative in any way. There have been plenty of examples, of ACTUAL (wow I can use caps too) css only menu's, here I will give you the link to them:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=css+only+menus&btnG ...

    And, because I am in such a good mood today, I will even give you a link to clink from the ACTUAL query I just gave you. It is a particularly good site relating to css menus:
    http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/
    This guy really knows what he's doing when it comes to css.

    Anyhoo, it begs the question for me, since when did digg become idiot's guide to web programming?

    Seriously, if you get your, "big tips" about web development off digg, well I just feel sorry for you.
  • hysterix, on 11/29/2007, -8/+0Meant to say at the beginning, "This is stupid, unnecessary, and is not new or innovative in any way."
  • r3negadeX, on 08/11/2008, -1/+2Well...it doesn't have JavaScript...so...yeah....
  • bonzooznob, on 11/29/2007, -0/+1No JavaScript - yes, but is it fully functional and usable in production? unfortunately no. Since IE (pre7) has select list zindex issues, the menu will fail in certain scenarios. Also won't work over an iframe in Konqueror (then again, nothing will), and it requires "precise" navigation... if you mouseout of one list, on your way to a sublist, the whole list collapses. "A" for effort though!
  • uppercanuck, on 11/29/2007, -0/+0The CSS is way too bloated and the visual style looks like one of those hideous menus from the 1990's. Sorry, this isn't for the pros.
  • kevyn, on 11/30/2007, -0/+1but its ugly as hell...
  • Mark777, on 03/10/2008, -0/+0I'm not Gibson hater (more like fan), but GRC's pure-css-menu is rip off from Stu Nicholls' "The ULTIMATE CSS only drop-down menu" http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/final_drop.html

    Quote from that site:
    NOTE: If you have arrived here from 'www.grc.com/menu2/invitro.htm' then I should point out that their menu is almost a direct copy of several of my menus. The basis of their menu is the same conditional comments that I have developed for my menus as early as March 2006. One of which is a non-standard conditional comment to target IE7 and all non-IE browsers.

    So... nothing new. Give the credit where it's due.
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