Doing it with style
Thanks to some pioneering work by Timo Huovinen https://thinkhtml.blogspot.com/ and a competition on Sitepoint, I can now offer a single level fixed width dropdown menu that works in all modern browsers including IE6 without the need for conditional comments, tables, hacks, extra markup or javascript. This versions differs in style from that produced by Timo but does use the same principle to work.
As the competition is now finished I can now publish my version.
The menu shown above also allows top level hover change of background images that persist when moving to the dropdown list, you can also use tabbing through the menu including the dropdown lists.
The first menu uses hover to open and close the dropdown lists and the second menu uses mouse clicks to open and close the dropdown lists. In the second menu the droplist will stay open even when the mouse is moved off the menu. Unfortunately Safari and Chrome do not support this method NOW working in Safari and Chrome.
Tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari(PC) and Google Chrome. Should also work in Mac browsers.
So there you have it, with a little lateral thinking and a lot of experimental work by Timo Huovinen, a fully functioning cross browser dropdown menu.
Timo also has produced a muti-level version and when I have time I will be seeing if this principle can be refined and adapted to produce other useful menus.
Because of all the time and effort spent in producing this demonstration I would ask that you respect my copyright.
This demonstration can be used subject to the following terms and conditions.
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