Parent "Mousedown" Layer Effects for NavBar

I am interested in being able to apply a Mousedown layer effect to a Navbar parent button for which a child-level link has been clicked. That is:

Menu <= Highlighted

Sub Menu 1 <= Clicked

Sub Menu 2

In this way, "Menu" is demonstrated as being the current page, whereas "Sub Menu 1" is the page you clicked.

I suspect I have to abandon the Navbar function and use layer modes exclusively, but beyond that I'm not sure how viable it is to throw in some jQuery functions around my custom buttons.

My brain is unusually slow this AM. Can you do a visual image of how this would work? Or is there a website where the buttons function in this manner?

Xara does support a mousedown layer as well as mouseoff and mouseover. But this only affects the appearance of the button when it is clicked. And as far as I know only supports one action.

You can create a pseudo button effect in which the mouse over button is actually on a pop-up layer. In this case the button on the pop-up layer can link to another action. The mouse off button links to the pop up layer.