Better Context Menus With Safe Triangles — Smashing Magazine

You’ve no doubt wrestled with menus that have nested menus before. I can’t count how many times I’ve hovered over a menu item that reveals another list of menu items, then tried to hover over that nested menu only to have the entire menu close on me.

That’s the setup for what I think is a pretty common issue when making menus — preventing nested menus from closing inadvertently. It’s not the users’ fault; leaving hover between menu levels is easy. It’s also not exactly the web’s fault; the menu is supposed to close if the pointer leaves the interactive area.

Before we dig deeper into the issue, let’s acknowledge that relying on hover interactions for displaying and hiding menu items is already somewhat problematic. Not all devices have a mouse, or a pointer, for that matter. You could argue that click (or tap) interactions are better. Take Amazon’s main navigation as an example. It requires a click to open the main menu and another click to...