For a web application we are hosting for some customers we use the Ultimate Dropdown Menu which is a CSS formatted menu product. The UDM is a third-party product – not something we did at my company.
The primary reason that we are using it is that it allows the developer to set a shortcut key so the users can access and use the menu using only the keyboard. This is a must for a web application that users use each day as their primary tool for data entry. Another reason is that the license is cheap! At 70 USD per server it is very competitive – you can’t even code a decent stylesheet for that amount of money.
The menu had one short coming though. The menu is based on unordered HTML lists (<ul>) which may be nested to desired level of nesting and we needed to add menu items to the menu dynamically using the DOM (Document Object Model) through JavaScript. However the menu API was missing a way to have it rebuild its internal state and make it update dynamically. This short coming has been solved in the new 4.43 release.
The Load XML extension is only possible because of a new public method called um.refresh, which re-initialises the navigation tree as though the page had been reloaded – many thanks to Mikkel Heisterberg for suggesting this.