I have had heaps of requests for my CSS ONLY horizontal drop down menu that works in Internet Explorer to be converted into a vertical flyout menu.

Because this uses a method that is not strictly valid xhtml I have resisted this BUT now I have relented.

Above is a flyout menu system that has two sub menus from the DEMOS item and one sub menu on all the others.

This works in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox etc. and does NOT use javascript.

Please do not contact me saying this does not validate, or does not work in Safari etc. It is purely to demonstrate that a CSS ONLY flyout menu can be made to work in Internet Explorer.

Opera 8.xx has a problem with the Google ads but I believe Opera 9 fixes this.

4th April 2006

Updated to change the colours and to show how to vary the width of the sub levels

CASCADING STYLE SHEET

16th March 2006

Because a lot of visitors are having trouble with the conditional comments and the cascading style sheets for this menu I have now removed the CSS to separate files and now show how to load these into the page.

If you look at the header of this page you will see that the normal method of loading a file is used for the non-ie browser css.

<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" type="text/css" href="css/flyout.css" />

The flyout.css file

The IE only style sheet is loaded using the conditional comment.

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" type="text/css" href="css/flyout_ie.css" />
<![endif]-->

The flyout_ie.css file

THE (X)HTML

The (x)html code for the flyout menu can be seen here in text format.

You will see that conditional comments have been used to hold the IE specific version of the menu which used nested tables. The other browsers will not see the tables and instead will use the normal unordered lists.

Please note that you will also need a standards compliant !doctype for this menu to work correctly.