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 The vast majority of users browsing the BU Web are using modern browsers. These newer browsers (Internet Explorer 4+, Netscape 6+) are far more standards-compliant than their predecessors. With this compliance comes full support for dynamic HTML technologies. With fewer than 1 percent using "old" browsers (such as Netscape 4), the BU Core Design embraces modern technologies to offer improved navigational functions on all Core Design pages.
First and foremost among these new technologies is the Dynamic Navigation Menu. The Core Design uses dynamic menus in the Primary Navigation Bar. Move your cursor over a category in the Primary Navigation Bar, and sub-topics within that category appear as a drop-down menu below the main navigational graphic. Visitors to the BU Web can now bypass the extra mouse clicks it would previously require to access internal pages on a site.
Look at the BU Visitor Center for an example. With the previous version of Visitor Center, browsers could access the 7 main categories from the home page. Since the Visitor Center has adopted the BU Core Design, browsers accessing the home page now have direct, one-click access to 37 pages in the Visitor Center (the 7 main category pages as well as 30 pages with category-specific content).
Dynamic menus also help reduce overall page size and improve download performance by centralizing the javascript code for the menu system in one location. After the first page on the site loads within a browser window, the browser no longer needs to re-download the code that produces the menus. An added benefit to handling dynamic menus in this manner is that it is far easier to maintain the menus when all pages use the same code from one file.
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