[Dynapi-Widgetdev] Menu Widget - resize or pack?

[Jim R. <gr...@cy...>]

It seems most people start with a drop down menu or similar for
Widget development, which oddly enough I've done.

You can see it running here:

	http://wallace.iim.uts.edu.au/staging/grumpy/dropdown.html

A few questions, is the Widget creation framework that's mentioned 
in the tutorials the preferred way? There was a comment that it
hadn't been finalised, so I kinda guessed a bit based on previous work
that I had done (eg: when to use .prototype. for methods and when 
not?)

What I'm looking for though, you'll notice that the panels are quite
long. That's because rather then make each item a separate panel, 
I've just done one big list. What I'd like to do is work out how long
the list will be, and to resize the panel as expected. In Java I've
got a nice thing in the Window object called pack(), which will
resize a Window based on the preferred size of the loaded panels,
components, etc. I can't see how to do this here. One reason is that
I want the content to be in an <ul></ul> wrapped in a table so I can
have a coloured border (which I know I could also make with
panels as well, as in the button widget tutorial example.)

One easy answer is to make each list item a panel, and enlarge the
containing panel when I add each one. Which would also allow me to
have a highlight on each rollover.

But the other thing I will need to do is work out the width and height
so I can position it correctly (eg: look at the third menu item
with Teaching and Learning, it's too wide.) I also want to size
them correctly, or resize if they need to be wider.

I could use the CSS properties to get font metrics, but I'd rather not.

Any ideas?