HTML Question

[daveyfire]

I'm usually pretty good with HTML, but this one's got me stymied...

I've been working on a website for a teacher. She requested to have Javascript drop-down menus in the top frame of her site, to be able to navigate the pages fine. I built the menus using Fireworks, and they look fine in their own frame. However, the top frame is only 100 pixels high, and the drop-down menus need much more room than that to be visible. Unfortunately, the HTML specification places the navigation frame at the bottom of all the layers on the page, and therefore I can't make the menu pop over the body frame. Is there a way to fix it so that I can layer the frames in the order I desire? The <layer> tag doesn't work out either, because of the order the frames are specified in...

https://www.smes.org/classes/beemer is the site.

Help

 

[vjp]

Is it practical to switch from using frames to using a table?

 

[daveyfire]

I would love to just switch to using SSI, but that would be a big pain for the teacher to have to include the file every time she created a new page. Same goes for a table. The server doesn't support Microsoft shared borders... other ideas?

 

[loopy]

Eeeeeew.

I too have experienced this issue, and the basic answer is that you cannot do it directly.

What I mean is this. Content in a frame will only be visible in that frame (this is a security feature built into the browsers, and cannot be changed).

However, there are workarounds that are possible, but they are not pretty.

Workaround 1. -
Rather than using a frames page, use a regular html page, and embed iFrames into it (if you are using 'Layer' tags, then chances are, you are using Netscape, and so this may not be possible, but perhaps the iLayer tag will be available to you).

Basically, you set up the iFrames in the places you would have the frames (actually, you may not actually want to use a "frame" for you top frame, but rather just include the menu code right in the page that uses the iFrames.

by doing this, the page containing the iframes can have content that cascades over the iframe/ilayer content.


Workaround 2. -
Create your menu bar in the top frame, but create actual pull down menus in bottom frame. this is tricky because you will probably need to include javascript in the bottom pane that will do this for you, but which can be called by your top frame. Creating content in the top frame and sending it to the bottom frame typically does not work out due to security issues.

The plus to this is that you can still use your regular old frames, rather than iFrames/iLayers which may not layout quite the same way, but minus is that it takes much more coordination in the javascript code.


I'm sure that there are probably even more ways around this, but these are the general types of workarounds you are likely to end up with for this scenario.

Hope this helps.

 

[daveyfire]

Thanks a lot Loopy. I'll play around with it!

 

[loopy]

No problem. I actually can't take credit for that - one of the other HTML gurus in my office supplied that. I'll let him know how it turns out.