You might not ever have noticed, but there are quite a few different ways to implement drop-down menus on websites.
First of all, on a Windows and on a Mac, all menus from all applications behave exactly the same. They can have multi-level sub-menus. When you click on a menu and it expands, it sticks there even if you take your mouse off the menu. If you click on another menu or anywhere else on the screen the menu closes (like contextual menus, a.k.a. right-click menus).
On the web there is no standard. Menus are implemented with Flash or Javascript and each site does a different thing. You have the case where menu expands automatically on mouse-over, or require a click, menus that close on mouse-out or click-out, menus that have arrows indicating submenus or not, etc.
For Sampa, I've made a very early decision that Menus would behave very similar to Windows' menus. Two basic reasons: First, users are used to its behavior, and, second, and more importantly, the Windows menu are very accessible and discoverable.
The problem with menus that disappear automatically on mouse-out (instead of on click-out) is that some users have difficulty keeping the mouse over the menu.
Why do I bring that up? From time to time, somebody, either a tech-savvy user or a newbie, complains about the way we do menus and our way is the least common on the web, but it is the easiest one, IMHO, for users.
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October, 2007
