I’ve seen keyboardable dropdowns where the subs do become visible on :focus (of the particular submenu item, not the parent li). They do look a bit weird though, appearing out of nowhere without the rest of the subs showing. Of course, IE6 doesn’t support :focus, but whatever.
I wouldn’t send people to a sitemap, but to a page with info about that theme/rubriek/whatever, and inside are further links.
For instance I had a menu for an insurance page. If you chose Transport, but clicked on that menu choice (people who make the dropdowns appear by hover don’t ever seem to think of clicking on the main link) get to the Transport page, which is about the three sorts we had: Cars, motorcycles/scooters, and boats. That page had small pieces of text about each sort of insurance and several clickie links to the individual pages-- they could choose to go directly to “get a quote” (one of the sub-sub menu items) or they could go to the “info/about/conditions” page (the other sub-sub menu item), each for that particular vehicle.
Those who could get the dropdown to work could use it as a dropdown, but it wasn’t required for anyone and the menu actually wasn’t so deep that you had to click through pages of garbage to get to any particular page (esp since the menu was prolly a little too redundant-- instead of navigating through Transport, you could instead choose the Get a quote main menu item as well and then choose your type of insurance on that new page too.
I think it was pretty nice, but even better was when I removed it entirely.
I would never build a menu out of Javascript, and never will have that as a sole menu option until every single user agent out there supports it, and cannot be turned off by the user. Which will never happen so long as 12-year-olds continue to do Javascript attacks on lax websites (when they made that epilepsy support forum flash crazy colours so the users has seizures… those kids should all be dropped from tall buildings). Javascript can make things pretty, or make things fancy, or make things slow. Beyond that, I avoid it. I hate scripts making things dance and sing unnecessarily (MooTools, I’m talking to you) and that’s reason #2 why I always surf with scripts off.
An example of why I hate Javascript menus: http://opmaatverhuizingen.nl visit it with scripts off. Click on what you DO see at the top, and you’ll get a nice advertisement for Open Cube, instead of the guy’s business. That’s just wrong on so many levels.
And yes, I know that’s not what brothercake is advocating. I’m not sure what he’d have in place of a main menu though. I don’t see any problems with a main menu available for everyone. Letting people get to the subs pages can be done in so many different ways.