Toby's Development Blog Just another PHP / Javascript Developer

Janko - At Warp Speed is an excellent blog, and if you haven't subscribed to the feed for it then I really suggest you do.

One post that really grabbed me recently was named 'Reinventing a Dropdown with CSS and jQuery', not the most imaginative of titles I grant you, but the results of the supplied tutorial are just fantastic.

I must admit that my first thought was that reinventing stuff is usually a bad idea, I mean the dropdown element works fine, it is functional and most web users would know how to use one without needing to think about it so why go to the hassle of prettying it up a bit?

Well the thing is, they have prettied it up a lot and I think the inclusion of graphics makes it more accessible.  Actually whilst I think about it, you may look at the first part of the code and dismiss it out of hand because it isn't very accessible (it uses <li> tags), however if you read on down they have included a way to achieve the same results with the normal <select> tag, so I don't know any reasons why this couldn't be incorporated into some web projects.