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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T18:19:07+00:00

When creating menus for html pages, there are a lot of libraries, frameworks and

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When creating menus for html pages, there are a lot of libraries, frameworks and plugins (like mentioned here). However, having studied various options it seems to me that

  • the menu is a series of elements defined on one page which selectively are displayed/hidden
  • all content activated by menu items is contained on one and the same page – together with all menu definitions

This brings, in my opinion, two problems:

  • the (single) page tends towards “unmanageable” with growing size
  • a search on something contained on the “third page” will result in the “first page” to be opened, and for a user it may not be obvious that he/she has to click through the menu to find what he/she was looking for

So I am looking for something where menu and content is more separated, but still makes use of the styling features of a modern framework (jQuery(UI), dojo, whatever), maybe on the basis of a JSON definition that can be loaded into each separate page.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Making an answer as request. 🙂

    The comments on your experience suggest that you ahve come across tab controls more than real navigation. Tab controls are designed to flip between content on the same page, hiding and showing content based on whcih tab is selected. This does have the drawbacks that you suggested of requiring all content to be on the same page (or to use ajax to load it).

    Conversely a menu system will usually just be a way of formatting a bunch of links you give it, possibly with a hierarchical structure. Usually a menu system in the raw HTML will be an unordered list containing links and possibly other unordered lists. The exact format may vary depending on the menu system in use. The menu system will tell you to put classes on the top level or to run some javascript over a specific element.

    In terms of generating this server side you are probably best off with either an include file or common server side code to generate the menus (to avoid having to maintain them individually in all the pages on your site).

    Having said all that I have no specific reccomendations but I did come across http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/css/36-eye-catching-jquery-navigation-menus/ whcih was the top google hit for “jquery navigation menus” and has plenty of options to look at. Additionally the one in the question you linked looks like it is a “proper” menu system.

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