After the user selects an option in the pulldown menu, the new page opens in a new window! This is useful when linking to sites not within your site when you do not want the user to leave your site. Your site will remain open in the other window so the visitor can come back to it when the are finished with the popup page. You can even control the size of the popup window, whether it has scrollbars, menubars, toolbars, etc.
The navigation menu above works by using the onChange function of the SELECT object to tell the window to load a new document. The URLs of the documents to jump to are given by the VALUE of the various OPTION tags contained in the SELECT.
This kind of navigation tool has the advantage that it takes up less space than a conventional menu made of text or image links, or an image map. Unfortunately, it also has some disadvantages.
One problem is that the navigation menu will take on the appearance of standard menus on whatever platform your visitors are using, which is likely to clash with whatever look and feel you have chosen for your pages on at least some platforms.
A more serious disadvantage is that this technique depends on JavaScript. As such, if you use it as the only method of navigation on your site, you will close your pages to users who have disabled JavaScript on their browser, as well as those who don't have JavaScript-capable browsers. As more and more sites use JavaScript to assault their visitors with pop-up dialogs, scrolling tickers, extra windows, layers and other assorted irritations, more and more Web users are likely to disable JavaScript so it is unwise to rely on it as the only way for people to get around your site.
You can make it easier on our visitors to find their way around your site. I highly suggest using the extremely popular and extremely useful menu list. It seems every good site has one.... So, put one on your site! If you use this script, please leave a link to our site in the pulldown menu!
Based on Xin's great Chained Selects script, we modified it here to specifically act as a navigational menu. It includes a helper function that loops through the interdependant select lists, and if an "end selection" has been made, takes the user to that selection's value (aka URL). Also supports opening the URLs in a new window. You can use this script to create a multi-level form menu of any dimension.
New! Script now supports a persistent feature, implemented using session cookies. With it enabled, the script remembers and loads the last selection lists of the user when page is reloaded or returned to. See updated docs for more info.
Demo: In the example below: 1) empty lists are disabled, 2) persistent feature is turned on (try reloading page). 3) The selected value is simply alerted for illustration.
This robust combo (drop down menu) can handle the workload of many! It allows you to select from multiple groups of link items to display- choose which group to actually show by clicking on text beneath the combo. If your page contains more than one combo, why not replace them all with just this one?
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