Fri, 2010-08-27 19:50
Hello,
I've seen a number of posts explaining that a Dynamic Menu is a menu that either has a drop down, fly-out, or some expandable feature to display more menu items.
My idea of a Dynamic Menu (as opposed to a Static Menu)is one that is not hard-coded & designed, in other words, not fixed.
I'm looking for a definition of a CSS menu where the sub-menu items can be added without changing the design or adding images to support the additional sub-men items. To illustrate further, my users will add additional sub-menu items as follows:
Menu Item : Flavors
Sub menu -> Chocolate
Sub menu -> Vanilla
Sub menu -> Strawberry
New user-added sub menu -> Coffee
The website menu will now add the additional sub-menu item "Coffee" to the sub-menu list without the need for interface changes. My understanding is that this is a Dynamic Menu since it can change as the users add additional items and is not fixed.
Is this a dynamic menu or not and can anyone define what kind of menu this is called.
Also, can anyone advise how graphical these types of menus can be (and perhaps some examples) - I want to avoid the typical boring drop-down menus, but understand that since this is "dynamic" the text cannot obviously be in image format, but perhaps the background can be.
Thanks very much for any advice on this...
Andy
Sat, 2010-08-28 08:36
#1
Sounds like bookmarks.
What you're describing is an achievement of back-end and front-end engineering.
Most people say "dynamic menu" to mean the old-fashioned drodown/dropline/flyout menus powered by Javascript.
What you are describing needs back-end processing. HTML and CSS cannot add anything to a page like that, and Javascript could but that's its own can of worms.
If done for a web page, the CSS would have to be maybe larger than normal for a dropdown so that it could accommodate any combination of words added to the dropdown.
I generally add whatever I need to my dropdowns without needing to change the CSS, but I have access to the HTML. For users to do that, you'll use (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, C#, Java, whatever backend language you've got running on the server) to actually add items to the menu.
Sat, 2010-08-28 11:16
#2
Using the phrase or word
Using the phrase or word 'dynamic' nearly always refers to content/elements that are not hardcoded and that possibly don't exist as such until such point as a script parses it's results back to the main file and generates the content fed to the browser, basically DB, CMS driven style sites.
I would not refer to dropdown or flyout CSS menus/links as dynamic it's somewhat misleading, CSS is not dynamic nor are link lists hardcoded and manipulated via CSS.