DHTML tree widgets

[ameoba]

Somehow I got roped into writing a sizable web application and it's been decided that there will be a Windows Explorer type navigation tree. I've done a bit of looking around the web and have seen countless implementations, all of which claim to be the greatest thing since <blink>. Anyone out there in [H]land have any experiences/recomendations/suggestions?

The most important features are :

• Arbitrarily deep nesting
• "reasonble" behavior on older/javascript disabled browsers
• ability to maintain state between loads (on a tree that might potentially change)

 

[maw]

all i can say is i implemented one of those before and ultimatly it wasn't that great. Conceptually, it kind of makes sense - people are used to explorer, so why not translate that to the web?

well, it turns out people's web habits are much different than their Windows habits, and it was pretty frustrating to dig through the menus to get to the section you need, this was made even more frustrating when you DIDN'T know where to go in the tree to find what you needed, so had to open (and close) many, many folders in search of the section you were trying to find. Add to that the frustration of having to go dig through several parts of the tree when you needed to find more than one thing.

I also learned from the experience that people didn't really like using windows explorer anyway, they would rather have a zillion shortcuts on their desktop than having to dig through explorer to get to anything. So it was misleading to think that a windows explorer type web navigation scheme would be welcome.

I finally ditched it in favor of an unordered list. it was long, but everything was open and right there to see. Not to mention MUCH easier to maintain!

 

[ameoba]

A normal menu system will be used for "normal" site navigation but there will be a certain amount of customer data that is going to be hierarchically organized. We remotely collect & report data on customer 'sites'. They monitor their sites, sites can be grouped into groups, groups of sites can be in groups (the level of nesting will depend on the customer - small customers may not want any groups - large ones may have 4-5 levels)... and there may be 100+ sites for any one customer. It will make sense to have roll-up/summary pages for groups of sites - and some users may not even want to go down to the level of individual sites. Displaying this as a tree of some sort seems to be the sensible way of doing it.