translucent dropdown?

[jscheuer1]

Wow. EI7, must be the new browser that's out
Anyways... I would just use... css transparency!
Example:

filter:alpha(Opacity=50); /*IE 6+*/
opacity:0.5; /*FF 1.5+/*
-moz-opaciyu:0.6 /*older versions of FF*/
-khtml-opacity:0.5; /*konqueror*/

Opera doesn't support opacity unfortunately

EIEIO - the newest browser on the farm, yes. Kidding aside, Opera does support opacity, starting with Opera 9.0. Opacity isn't a really good solution here because it also makes the menu text translucent. Some folks wouldn't mind that but, generally you want the text nice and crisp and legible.

[mburt]

Again, right. I forgot about that. But you could position the text within another div (position:absolute), and assigning left and top to the menu's offsetLeft and offsetTop.

[jscheuer1]

Again, right. I forgot about that. But you could position the text within another div (position:absolute), and assigning left and top to the menu's offsetLeft and offsetTop.

That starts to get messy, I would rather resort to the IE 6 alpha image loader, even though it is really tricky because, there is less chance of an undesirable offset arising in some browser. Fortunately, with the eventual virtual demise of IE 6 and the fact that even without the alpha image loader, this technique degrades acceptably in IE 6, it really is quite a simple effect to achieve if you are at all familiar with css and semi transparent .png's. BTW, where you mentioned:

I usual put those type of scripts at the beginning of the body though

That part isn't a script. It is just some HTML code that effectively preloads the images and, I did say:

You may want to preload the images for best effect. A real easy way to do that is to add this just after your body tag: