I thought about that but, the sad truth is that as wonderful as this menu is, even in its original form, it is inaccessible if the user has no JavaScript capability.I'm afraid you're wrong. If you disable the style sheet for the Suckerfish demo, you'll see the menu as a list - exactly what it's marked-up to be. The system would be more accessible if the menu started as a plain list and was altered afterwards, but it is better than most as it is.
All the script does is apply a style to the menu items so that IE will show submenus when a parent becomes the target of a mouseover event. Decent user agents don't need this as they support the :hover pseudo-class on more elements than just a. In any case, it is the author's responsibility to make the top-level items usable links so that an IE user who isn't prepared to disable CSS support temporarily (and most IE users wouldn't know they'd have to, let alone how) can navigate to section overview pages or to a site map.
Another problem showed up: Special characters like danish and irish letters æ,ø,å and ó doesn't show properly in the menu.
But I take it, that proper escaped characters will do the job.Really? They seem to display fine. However, as a general rule it isn't appropriate to use SGML character entities (&#nnn; or &name;) in scripts as a script engine has no real concept of entities. Instead, they should be escaped.
For example, a acute has the á and á entity references. 225 in hexadecimal is 0xe1, so it would be escaped as '\u00e1'. If you look at the entity references list (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html) in the HTML specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/), you'll see that the hexadecimal values are written in the comments as U+xxxx.
I'll look into the possibility of running serverside scripts [...]You don't need full-blown script support, just SSI (server-side includes). It literally just includes one file within another.
... but I didn't get the last comment ??
are you saying, that some browsers don't support JacaScript, or that people, who turn the JavaScript option off, won't see the menu ?Yes, to all of those questions. Client-side scripting (on the Web, at least) should always be considered unreliable and optional. It should never be used to provide critical functionality such as navigation unless you have a fool-proof alternative available. A well designed system will degrade properly to that alternative so you wouldn't need to duplicate any information.
The number of possible visitors which will have scripting disabled will vary according to your target audience, so it's pointless to quote numbers.
Mike