General developer forum

The form API does not seem appropriate to my problem since forms are intended for a different purpose (user submits input that is processed at the server). I would need a dropdown menu that is used in a kind of navbar and the menu items are links to other pages. The menu items also contain more HTML content than just text, for example badges in the side. This is possible in Twitter Bootstrap dropdown menus, while the standard HTML select element does not have such support for nested HTML elements. The Moodle html_writer does not seem to have any methods for the dropdown menus I am looking for, only the select elements.