CSS Menu Writer debuts
Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.
I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu levels is as simple as pointing to your files and folders. If the client changes the approved site structure after you’ve already created your page templates, no problem: just drag files and folders to their changed locations and CSS Menu Writer will update your navigation.
The program comes with four horizontal and four vertical menus, each in 12 different color schemes—96 menus to start—with unlimited sub-levels. You can easily create Doug-Bowman-style “sliding doors” effects, as well as doing all the obvious stuff you’d expect to be able to do, like changing menu width, height, margin, and padding; swapping backgrounds and images; and saving custom creations as new presets to reedit or share with colleagues. The program also integrates easily with Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor.
CSS Menu Writer costs $99.99, but if you buy before May 27, it’s just $74.99.
Tags: webdesign, tools, software, webassist, css
Filed under: Accessibility, Adobe, Applications, CSS, Code, Design, Tools, Web Design, WebAssist, architecture, client services, development, eric meyer, work
I’m okay with the entire piece, but the trademark sign pushes it a bit over the edge. Nothing that doesn’t emanate from a PR department normally uses trademarks. Knowing your writing I know that this is your sincere opinion, but it might not be what people unfamiliar with it are going to assume.
Standards compliant is great, but I’d love to know if it goes the extra step: accessible? keyboard compliant? With ARIA roles and states? Now THAT would be a great product.
Jesper: Interesting. I can see where you’re coming from. I included the trademark to help the manufacturers protect their new baby.
In an informal post like this one, I wouldn’t include a trademark or registered mark for a well-established brand like Adobe or Apple. But a new product (or a small, less well known company) is different, I think.
I’ll sometimes include Happy Cog’s trademark in a post. Not because our PR department wrote the post (we don’t have a PR department). But because the name is a property we registered to protect ourselves and our clients.
Thanks for writing!
Andrea: Good questions. I suspect the answers are positive.
Yikes! Do you really believe somebody will pay $100 for this? Why not getting the menu for free from anywhere on th web? How the heck can somebody even think about selling markup and style? I’m not getting it.
@cruster
A high speed, low drag expert like yourself would be paying to save time. If you choose to grab it from elsewhere or maybe you have your own library of things like this, you would not be alone. As for how the heck somebody can sell markup and style, I do it all the time: it’s called my day job.
Hmmm… Interesting… Even more coming from someone that hates drop down menus ;D http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0604f.shtml
I can see Dreamweaver-heavy shops and universities using this a lot (and places with a lot of funding).
I’d like to fiddle around with it to see how it outputs the CSS.
The thing about products like this is that beginners tend to use them when they should really be hand coding/learning semantics; and an advanced user who understands whats happening probably wouldn’t use it anyway.
So it’s kind of a catch 22
my2cents
I wouldn’t assume this product was built for the folks who do this everyday and do most likely have our own quickly tailorable libraries of functions ready to roll. However, if it reduces the amount of poorly coded, inaccessible and downright ugly drop-down menus being spit out by Dreamweaver design view by even 1%, I’d be a very happy camper.
I say good job on a standards compliant implementation of a potentially useful product. Now please sell it to Adobe so it comes built in with Dreamweaver so the kiddies don’t have to track it down.
Otherwise, Textmate FTW. =)
Zeldman: As you know, I didn’t mean to imply anything, just to mention that including that particular glyph could make other people think this post could be grouped in with another, less reputable, group of posts. Thanks for listening and providing your reasoning!
@Nones, I thought the exact same thing.
True. I’ve never been a big fan of drop-down menus, and I try to avoid them in what I design and in our client work. But they’re a hot little item in many quarters in spite of my preferences and recommendations.
University sites are a category that pretty much insists on having fly-out menus (in part because university sites are huge, and every department wants to be “on the home page”).
If you’re working on a design where you determine that fly-out menus are what’s best for your users … or if you’re working on a project where the client insists on having a fly-out menu … it’s nice to have a tool that can automate the tedium of creating these menus in a standards-compliant way, and ensuring that they work correctly across browsers and platforms.
That isn’t the answer you wanted—miserable trolls seek the unhappiness and humiliation of others—but when you grow up, you’ll understand. It is possible to admire a basketball player’s grace, even if you’re not a fan of the sport.
Like –I bet– most of you reading this, I learned to create CSS Menus the “hard way”, and while my old school experience has made me skeptical of anything WYSIWYG-related having a decent code output… if Mr. Z says it’s good for his standards, it is probably good for everyone else’s. The downside, of course may be for HTML newbies who’d get used to these things instead of learning how the whole thing really works (not unlike many Dreamweaver “coders” I’ve come to know)… but if you use Dreamweaver, churning out websites is your bread and butter, and charge more than $100 while at it, this thing could easily pay for itself rather quickly in terms of time saved and with the peace of mind bonus of web standards compliance.
Thanks for the kind words, Jeffrey. One bit of clarification: Jeffrey indicates that CSS Menu Writer will rewrite your navigation if you change files and folders. While a nifty idea for 2.0, not a feature now. You can, however, re-enter CSS Menu Writer and modify any menu item or customize any menu level at any time. So, if you were pulling your menus from your site hierarchy (which had been updated), you would select the top level item and click Get from File System and then navigate to the relevant folder and re-populate your menus.
A couple of folks had mentioned how tools like these give newbies a shortcut so they won’t really get the benefit from really learning CSS. On the contrary, we made a diligent effort to position the tool so folks could quickly generate a preset menu or, if they wanted to customize their menu, expose the CSS properties in a visual manner to give instant feedback. Quick example: let’s say you want to move the labels in the sub-menus over more to the right, so you increase the left padding to 20px. This shows up in the preview area as an item now larger than the main menu item, given the way the box model works. To bring the two back to the same width, the user would need to reduce the width of the sub-level item by 20px. So now the user has a better grasp of how the box model is applied. The more you know about CSS, the more you can do with CSS Menu Writer, but its intended to bring newbies into the world of web standards compliant output with an easy on-ramp.
Andrea - we don’t support ARIA in version 1, but its a beautiful idea for v2. My initial thought is that we could make this an optional selection, but on by default. We could easily write out the roles and states attributes for folks as well as include the namespace declaration so it would validate properly. Thanks for the suggestion!
I used to have this sort of opinion, too, but I’ve found myself changing it, at least as it relates to specific issues such as this one.
If computer programs begin to yield semantic, valid menu sets consistently and to the satisfaction of the user’s design, then the need for a person to know how to code it from scratch disappears.
The tasks that we accomplish on computers today are done at a significantly higher level than those that we tackled in years past. Think about it—if you want to write a data-driven application in PHP and MySQL, you have a set of very useful APIs for exchanging information between the two platforms. You don’t have to worry about all of the low-level stuff that actually makes it work—someone else has already done that for you.
The ActiveRecord pattern used by Ruby on Rails (and yes, I know, others) takes it a step further, allowing you to interact with database tables as though they were just another bunch of classes and objects in your program. You don’t need to know the low-level details to build a robust application. Those details will not (necessarily) help you build a better Rails app, just as knowing the internals of your Blackberry’s JVM will not help you create a better calculator or a more tacky rehash of a decades-old arcade game. Knowledge without a reasonable practical application is just trivia.
I think he was typing in jest, Jeffrey.
[...] Menu Writer debuts More… __________________ Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report - Blog by Jeffrey [...]
wow…
calling them “miserable trolls” is bad enough,
but going on to say that they actually _seek_
the “unhappiness and humiliation” of others?
isn’t that just a bit too much projection?
-bowerbird
@Joseph Lowery - thanks for the response! I’d be interested to know why you’d make it optional, since it wouldn’t hinder anything for people who didn’t need it - they probably wouldn’t even know it was there!
Andrea - like I said, my first thought :-). It was really a reaction to having some folks object to adding any JavaScript to a page. However, it’s very well-warranted code, so that’s why I thought turning it on as a default would be a good middle ground. Still, it’s a very good idea.
[...] CSS Menu Writer debuts [...]
So I guess Jeffrey was against drop-downs before he was for them. Flip-flopper!
drop downs are cool stuff
Yes, cool as long as you can use a mouse. If you can’t, and must use a keyboard, they’re not coll at all. Maybe you have mobility problems that confine you to a keyboard. Maybe you’re blind and can’t see a mouse pointer. Maybe you sprained your wrist playing racketball last night. There are many reasons why one might not be able to use a mouse.
Most, by a huge percentage, drop down menus can not be operated by a keyboard. These menu systems effectively hide most of the site content from people who can’t use a mouse. “Suspecting” the answers to Andrea’s questions would be positive leads to the same wrong answers that we get when we make assumptions. The CSS Writer developers have confirmed (via email) that these menus are not keyboard operable, and have logged the question for a possible future version.
Make me an extension with pure css menus and keyboard support and I’ll buy it.
@Jeffrey,
I guess web gurus are as human as us trolls and sometimes they have bad days as everyone else and even if they are grown up enough to understand that is possible to admire a basketball player’s grace, even if you’re not a fan of the sport, they might not be smart enough to get a joke.
“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do”. - Soren Kierkegaard
@Nones, my apologies. I thought you were being a miserable troll.
Ha! Ha! Ha! |*Applause*| Neatly done, @Miserable Troll.
No worries mate. Take it easy… :P
@Stockbridge Consultants:
Not familiar with rel=”external nofollow” then?
[...] 14 May 2008 6 am eastern [...]
My question is: do YOU use Dreamweaver? I’m a novice coder who started in Notepad and have been using CoffeeCup HTML Editor for a few years now. I emailed A List Apart a couple weeks ago, asking for an article reviewing code editors, but maybe I’m asking an obvious question.
What editors are recommended for standards-aware development? Must I get an expensive one to compete with the pros?
No, I hand-code in an ancient HTML editor called PageSpinner. The product’s website gives an honest picture of how old and non-slick the product is. I’ve been using it since 1996; before that, I wrote HTML by hand in SimpleText, a free text application that came with Macintosh System 7. (It was like Notepad, which you started with.)
Those are very good choices.
We don’t do product reviews (we’d be a lot richer if we did).
That’s up to you. You can use the free text editors that came with your OS. Or you can use slightly fancier text editors. CoffeeCup sofware, which you’re using, is great: it supports your hand-coding. Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression are both really good. It depends how much hand-coding you want to do, how much previewing in the authoring tool you need to do, what your work habits are, and what your budget looks like. It’s all good.
No. Pros are judged by their work, not by the software they use.
ARG Poll: Obama Holds Small Lead in Oregon The Republic of T.: America Will Be… Clusterflock: music changes wine’s taste Talking Points Memo: Firedoglake: Are We Giving Saudi Arabia Nukes? Jeffrey Zeldman:CSS Menu Writer debutsPortly Dyke: In Which Work Eats My Entire Brain Bitty’s Back Porch: Bugging Out All Things Digital: Blockbuster: Citi Boosts Target, Adds to Top Picks List [Voices] Camera Obscura: In which it is discovered that my backyard is full of bird stuff
Nathan,
Panic’s Coda is a nice, inexpensive editor for the Mac that has a lot of nice little helpful features (good syntax highlighting, some auto-complete functionality, doctype snippets, and more). TextMate is also a good one or the Mac (it’s good for a lot more than HTML/CSS, too).
On Windows, I’ve always been very comfortable with ConText, but have more recently been favoring Notepad++.
The most important thing for me in any editor (for any language) is syntax highlighting. I can do without the auto-completes and auto-formatting, but I’ve been pretty much spoiled by syntax highlighting and really need to have it.
[...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu [...] [...]
I would recommend the Pluginlab menu products, they are standard compliant, validate and have extensive keyboard support. None can be said about WebAssits. Not sure why you would endorse none accessible script generators here!
It should be mentioned that WebAssist is well known as a company providing little to no tech support for their products, which makes them a bad deal for the people who can use them: beginners.
The following is Webassist’s tech support policy:
http://www.webassist.com/professional/support/techsupport.asp
I would not buy anything from them, but that’s just my opinion (I’m not a beginner anymore, so it doesn’t affect me, anyway). I provide the advice in the spirit of openness, so that potential buyers can make an informed decision. Good luck!
Irv, your statement that we provide “little to no tech support” is completely untrue. Every product comes with free technical support incidents and we offer tons of support on our forums to help people before they even get to that point. We have a full range of solution recipes that we provide to help people understand how to achieve certain goals, like making a CSS Menu Writer menu dynamic. Here’s a full page of our Solution Recipes.
We even help people who are trying to get started with web design and development that are not specific to our products, like showing folks how to install PHP and MySQL on Windows and Mac.
We recently made available an entire slate of interactive tutorials for those just getting started in Dreamweaver CS3. This series and a slew of other support information can be found by visiting our Web Pro Center
We work really hard on support and try every way we can to help our customers be successful.
[...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu [...] [...]
@Nathan: Smashing Magazine had a recent review of 35 code editors a few weeks ago. Looked like a nice roundup to me.
Joseph Lowery wrote:
“Irv, your statement that we provide “little to no tech support” is completely untrue. ”
I stand 100% behind my statement. As shown on the link I provided, you offer 1 (one!) instance of tech support per product - products with more than one instance are really “suites” or bunch of products, so the 1-per product “support” policy is still in effect.
Given that 1 is the smallest and closest number to “no support”, my assertion that you offer little (1) to no (0) tech support is absolutely true.
http://www.webassist.com/professional/support/techsupport.asp
It is nice, indeed, that you include some sample materials, but tech support is completely different from what you now call “tech support”. If that were not true, you woudn’t have felt the need to create the tech support policy page referenced above.
The number of support incidents is tied to the cost of the product. Look at the chart you yourself have pointed out: DataAssist has 3, eCart 4, SiteAssist 3. And all of the products have at least 1 support incident, so that’s not “no support” even by your own calculation.
What you’re leaving out of the equation is the human factor. Many filed support incidents are refunded because the user has found a bug, encountered a misstatement in the docs or pointed out a misunderstanding. We’re constantly trying to better our products and support our customers achieve their goals.
[...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, … [...]
[...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer? for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, … [...]
Kramer auto Pingback [...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer? for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. … <http://www.zeldman.com/2008/05/14/css-menu-writer-debuts/#comment-37378> Comments for Jeffrey Zeldman… <http://www.zeldman.com> Web Design Discussion : Web site design software? Subject: Web site design software? Posted: 25 May 2008 at 4:09pm If you are doing ASP / ASP.NET sites … you can use the new FREE
Kramer auto Pingback [...] CSS Menu Writer debuts Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer? for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. … <http://www.zeldman.com/2008/05/14/css-menu-writer-debuts/#comment-37378> Comments for Jeffrey Zeldman… <http://www.zeldman.com> Web Design Discussion : Web site design software? Subject: Web site design software? Posted: 25 May 2008 at 4:09pm If you are doing ASP / ASP.NET sites … you can use the new FREE
[...] giorno fa ho girato ad un mio amico questo link. Jeffrey Zeldman presentava sulle pagine del suo blog CSS Menu Writer, un’estensione per [...]
[...] Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : CSS Menu Writer debuts - Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs. Tags: accessibility, administration, ajax, apache, api, appengine, architecture, books, caching, CDN, cms, code, component, css, development, dreamweaver, economics, erlang, extjs, finance, financial, gears, google, healthcare, hospitals, howto, htaccess, investing, javascript, jquery, library, medicine, menus, money, offline, programming, prototype, screencast, standards, survey, sysadmin, tutorial, video, web, Web2.0, webdesign, yahoo, yui [...]
[...] Read More on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report… [...]
[...] - 31k - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : CSS Menu Writer debutsJeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report - Blog by Jeffrey […] ….. I look at it as the [...]
Thanks for this tool!! Spry 1.6.1. widgets in Dreamweaver don’t work that well.
I agree with Matthias. CSS Writer is much better. Thanks.
CSS Writer is cool. The system requirements are good for old computers too.
Looks very good. I have tested the View Gallery on the webassist.com-Website and must say: Great.
Having recently returned to web design (from a hiatus in graphic design and marketing) I was overwhelmed by the evolution of code, since my first foray into HTML 10 years ago. I stumbled on CSS Menu Writer a couple of days ago, bought the whole Web Assist package, and am happily designing a site, without concern for what different versions of browsers support.
Code; schmode. I was a purist, too. Now I’d rather spend the time making a site look great than crunching the code in the back room.
Good for Web Assist; they saw a market for their product and went for it. Adobe missed an opportunity to design a more user friendly interface for Dreamweaver.
I love drop downs. There are so cool.
I can’t top that, but your story just made my day!