The information in this article applied exclusively to XUL development for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. When published, no other browsers support XUL. The question is: Do you have a target audience using Mozilla/Firebird exclusively that can support XUL-only development? Do you think that XUL is robust enough to become a standard supported by multiple browsers? When do you think that might happen? Let us know in the Web Development forum.
Few Web development tasks are messier or more tedious than implementing a DHTML hierarchical menu. Fortunately, all that spaghetti code is going away. Here's what the future of hierarchical menus looks like for Mozilla.
by Nigel McFarlane
March 17, 2004
p until now, the heart of a Web page was HTML, but that's changing; HTML is simply not flexible enough to meet modern Web development needs. The <SELECT> element, for example, can contain only one set of menu options, although those options can be grouped a little using the <OPTGROUP> tag. If you want something fancier—particularly a multi-level menu—then you have to explore alternatives beyond pure HTML. This article shows how you can radically simplify multi-level menus for use with Mozilla to. You'll never want to work with the older, messier techniques again.
What You Need
Any standard version of Mozilla, either the Mozilla Application Suite or the Firebird standalone browser.
Developer Choices for Hierarchical Menus
Developing a hierarchical menu means breaking out of the HTML box. There are some standard moves that developers make: use Flash; use Java; use ActiveX. Apart from training issues, the main problem with these solutions is that they force you to make assumptions about the end-users' Web browser, plug-ins, and security setup or their willingness and ability to change those in order to run your application. Even though making such assumptions is not a good idea, decisions to use particular non-standard technologies are common; developers and sites use these assumptions knowing that an attendant restriction of the potential user-base is inevitable. For example, a huge number of Web sites rely, at least partially, on the likelihood that their users will have Flash installed.
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p until now, the heart of a Web page was HTML, but that's changing; HTML is simply not flexible enough to meet modern Web development needs. The 
