Re: text menus vs graphical menus

This is a no-brainer for me:
graphical menus, definitely.

The only accessibility concern to have with using graphics vs. text is
people using text-based browswers.  Well, folks, we've entered the 21st
century and there are probably only five people out there still only surfing
with text-based browsers, or browsing with images turned off.  Even
cell-phones are going graphical nowadays.

And don't be worried about load time.  Any web graphics professional worth
his salt knows how to make buttons that are small, consist of only a few
colors, and can optimize them to 1 or 2k, or even less than 1k!  Using a
grahpical menu can only add a few paltry seconds to load time on a dialup,
and a few miliseconds to load time on anybody using broadband.  And in a few
years, just about everybody will be on broadband.

Let's face it.  Graphical menus look prettier, neater, more professional,
and progressive than text menus, even ones using a css hover (which doesn't
work in Netscape anyway).  And using graphical menus allows you to do nice
things like mouseovers.  Personally, and I know this is strictly opinion,
99% of the time when I see a website that's using text menus, I think the
website looks unprofessional, dinosaured, cheap, and, well, pardon the term,
crap.

And if you're really worried about those five dudes out there who refuse to
let go of their text browsers, you can always do alt-text on your images.

Jeremy Pratte
Web Development
Clearpages.com
jeremy(at)clearpages.com

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA