Drop Down Menus: CSS vs Spry (javascript)

Can someone give me the lowdown on Drop Down Menu best practice in words of one syllable please - I'm getting pretty confused with this.

I've been playing around with Dreamweaver and their SPRY menus work well and are easy to create but I was nervous of using them as they require Javascript to be active on the end users browser which of course isn't necessarily a given. So that being so, a single level SPRY navigation bar is as much as you can do safely with further navigation elements available wherever you land. That didnt seem very good to me so I was looking for a pure CSS option that I had understood to be possible.

To that end I found this excellent tutorial at http://ago.tanfa.co.uk/css/examples/css-dropdown-menus.html which outlines in simple terms how to build horizontal/vertical multi-level drop down/pop out menus  great  but theres a catch. Because of limitations with the IE browser and how it handles CSS, they use a javascript fix (the whatever:hover written by Peter Nederlofto) to allow older versions of the IE browser to work with this code so to all intents and purposes it is no different from the SPRY menus, albeit with a smaller number of end users exceptions (i.e. only those that use IE will need to allow Javascript to run rather than all end users as is the case with the SPRY option&. so I think Im back to square one  a single level navigation bar and separate lower level navigation options on each landing page &.. is that really the best way to do it for a site that is aimed at the internet where you are unsure of what browsers are being used rather than an intranet where you have a clearer understanding of the system landscape you are targeting?