DHTML dropdown menu’s have been greatly improved in terms of accessibility, standards compliance, and weight using the Suckerfish technique of building pure CSS-based menus and then attaching a small javascript that allows Internet Explorer 6 to mimic the CSS hover method. Once the die-hards hanging onto IE6 let go, we won’t have to worry much about this anymore, but for now it looks like it’s going to linger for a bit.

I’ve been using JQuery for a bit now for all of my DOM manipulation and have found great savings in the amount of JavaScript code I have to write and the ease in which it can be employed in a CSS based site.

While this is generally the last piece to get IE working with your menu’s, here’s the JQuery code to replace the suckerfish Javascript, which is being used on this site now. If you’re familiar with suckerfish, the JQuery code should be readable enough to figure out what’s going on.

I’m putting this post out there for Javier, who reads my blog, but doesn’t understand a word of it, and the answer to that burning question is, no my wife won’t let me date that girl from work ;)