Any disadvantages?
Nothing is ever perfect, and
the menu has some disadvantages of its own:
-
UDM 4 does not provide rich-content or dynamic functionality to
Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4
-
They can still see the plain
links, but they won't have styling or dynamic behaviors.
-
Some browsers are only partially-supported
-
Opera 5 and 6, and Konqueror 3.1 or earlier,
can only see the main navigation bar, because
they don't support enough scripting to have stable dynamic menus.
This is also the case for
Mac/IE5 in
OS9 or earlier when using
a horizontal navbar, and Mozilla browsers 1.2 or earlier
when using a relatively-positioned navbar
(later versions of these browsers have full support).
-
It cannot be used inside a
WYSIWYG editor
-
If you open your menu in the "Design View" mode of an editor such as
Dreamweaver or FrontPage, it probably won't work; the editor may
even re-write its code destructively.
-
An HTML
structure may create more
maintenance work for you
-
Compared with having all the menu
data in a single javascript file. This won't be a problem if you
use any kind of server-side includes; but if
not, it will increase the amount of hand-editing you have to do.
You can mitigate the final issue by having
menus that are dynamically generated from data in your
configuration file. This approach
will reduce the amount of HTML
you have to copy-and-paste between pages - only the top list,
instead of the whole structure.
UDM 4 could be generated
in pure javascript like other menus, but then
it wouldn't be properly accessible - you'd still
have to provide redundent links in plain
HTML,
so you may as well make your navigation bar from that in the first place.
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