Hopefully I'm reading your question right, cowpie...
WHat you're wanting is basically a page with a menu that has three links (for example): Cats, Dogs and Turtles. We'll say "cats" is the default page you come to. When you're on the "cats" page, you want a submenu to be opened up under the "Cats" heading, and (again, for purposes of example) you want the background color of "Cats" and the submenu of "cats" to be white, and th etext to be red abd bold - while the other links have a blue background and normal black text.
When someone clicks to "Dogs". and that page opens, you want "Dogs" to have a submenu with a white background and bold, red text, but "Cats" reverted back to black on blue - just like "turtles"...
Am I reading you right? If so, then yes, this is a simple thing to do via CSS. Here's an example of how to do it (and you'll probaby need to edit to customize for yourself, as I'm typing it off the top of my head):
HTML:
<body id="cats">
<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#">Cats</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">sublink1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink3</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#">Dogs</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">sublink1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink3</a></li>
</ul>
<li><a href="#">Turtles</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">sublink1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">sublink3</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</li>
</ul>
</body>
The CSS to follow would be like so:
CSS:
ul#nav li ul {display:none;}
/* this bascially says that, by default, the submenus for all #nav items should not be shown, only the top-level link will be seen */
ul#nav li a, ul#nav li a:link {
background:blue;
color:#000;}
/* this says the default top level links will have a blue background with black text */
body#cats ul#nav li ul {display:block;}
/* This says "if the page ID is "cats" then you're on the "cats" page, and the ul of #nav - which is normally not shown, is to be displayed, exposing the submenu links" */
body#cats ul#nav li a, ul#nav li a:link {
background:#FFF;
color:#C00000;
font-weight:bold;}
/* this says "if the body id is "cats", then you're on the "cats" page, and the links should have a white background with bold, red text" */
Hopefully that was a bit clearer than mud for you. All you need to do, subsequently, is to give each body tag an ID that's uniquely associated with the page in question, and alter the CSS above to reflect that. Then, when the end user surfs through the pages, they'll know what page they're on, and see the submenus associated with *only* that page.
HTH!
cowpie
