Drop down menu slows page load

[hessodreamy]

I have built a drop down menu so that a sub-menu appears when you hover over
the main menu item etc.
However there's quite a lot of sub menus to deal with, and the page now take
s a stupid amout of time to load. At first I thought it was due to too much
reading from the db, but then I copied the generated html for the menu into
an include file and that didn't speed things up at all.
A link to the code snippet is listed below. Is there any way to speed this u
p? or take action only when the rest of the page has loaded? I could use frames, but would prefer not to.
Cheers

code snippet

[bpat1434]

Seems like you're using javascript to do the sub-menus. Seems like this is more a JavaScript issue.

Personally, when I do something like this, I like to write everything to a variable first, and then echo the variable. THis way, I'm not outputting broken information all the time.

~Brett

[hessodreamy]

Well, yeah - it is a javascript issue as thats whats doing the work. But is there a different way to do it? Someone has suggested using JPSpan, which I Will look into. Has anyone any knowledge of this?

[gfoot]

Assuming you're complaining about page load time, rather than anything like the popups taking a while to pop up:

How big is the generated page? Remember that all your nested submenus need to appear in the HTML document sent to the client, so if you have a huge number of them it will just make a massive document, taking ages to transmit over the network. There's one argument for not having too complex a menu structure, and maybe not doing popups at all (though generally they're not too slow).

Some other thoughts: If you can save out the menu structure in a plain .html file, or set appropriate caching headers, then you could include it in a frame or something and the user's browser would only ever have to fetch it from the server once. That would only work for static content of course, and it would still take a long time to load the first time.

Another thought: If it is HTML volume which is causing your slow page loads, you could write more terse HTML, particularly in the bits which get repeated a lot in the submenus. However, your HTML doesn't look particularly wordy anyway, and it would have to be pretty fat to make a difference here.