My navigation is basically a list of categories straight from the database in a vertical line of <a> display: block's

Now does anyone have any suggestion as to what I could do to compress this into some sort of scalable menu but also keep the links crawlable (so this excludes javascript I presume)

Umm CSS Menu's are crawlable. You should check this one out I found online. It's all CSS based with DIV Tags and tables.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/HTML/purecssmenus.aspx

That's a predecessor of Suckerfish menus, and a bit dated. Suckerfishes use unordered lists or definition lists for the links, not tables.

IMHO, one of the best types of those menus is the Superfish menu. You can see a menu based on it I made at http://forrestcroce.com.

BTW, if you can see the link in the source code it's crawlable. If you use JavaScript to enhance the presentation of an element it has no bearing on how a crawler will read it.

tim

Good! I might use that regardless!

However, is there anything for scrolling maybe? I don't know.

What do you mean? What exactly do you want to scroll? Not the menu, I hope? I wouldn't think that would be too user-friendly. Perhaps you meant a drop-down, rather than the dropline I used? That's possible, and there's a Superfish variant of it at the link I provided.

tim