Navigation is a hot topic among web designers. It's easy to get caught up in the many debates that are circling around about the design and functional aspects of website navigation. While working out the do's and don'ts of good navigation is important, our focus for this chapter is on the code. We aren't going to worry about whether a menu looks best on the top, left, right, or middle of the page. We are not going to discuss the pros and cons of popups versus plaintext menus. We leave that battle to the web designer (the person who provides the artistic view) and the information architect (the person who decides how the navigation scheme flows from the home page).
Instead, we'll show you how to write the code. Static menus are easy to build. Simply hard-code the menu items within the navigation controls and you're ready to go. The drawback of embedding links in code is that once URLs change, developers have to be called in. Would you or your coworkers...