Advantages for Using FrontPage (Part I)
Ever since I've been doing SEO work, I've always griped and complained about FrontPage and all the extraneous code it puts in the section of the page, etc. Then recently, I had the opportunity to visit with a group of advanced search engine...
Finding a Good HTML Editor
Once you've decided to write your own HTML, and you've got some
idea of how it all works, there's one thing left to think about:
which program are you going to use to do it? While you can use
programs like Notepad or Wordpad that come with...
Showing and Hiding HTML elements using Layers
A long time back I visited a site that had a very fancy, animated navigation bar. Now, as a professional web developer, I'm not in favor of DHTML-supported, fancy navigation bars, but it was very fascinating. What they had done was, whenever you...
Web Designing Tips
Web Design Tips:
Easy That’s how you’d like life to be, right? Especially when you’re creating a website on your own. But that doesn’t mean you want the site to look severe and just functional. you want it to be pretty...
WHAT ARE HOVER ADS?
WHAT ARE HOVER ADS? Copyright Tanner Larsson Http://www.Work-At-Home-Resource-Center.com Hover ads have been touted as the replacement and successor of those irritating and annoying pop up ads and it seems that the world have mixed feelings about...
DHTML-Introduction
Think of DHTML as not a singular technology but a combination of three existing technologies glued together by the Document Object Model (DOM):
1. HTML - For creating text and image links and other page elements.
2. CSS - Style Sheets for further formatting of text and html plus other added features such as positioning and layering content.
3. JavaScript - The programming language that allows you to accesses and dynamically control the individual properties of both HTML and Style Sheets.
The way JavaScript accesses the properties of an HTML document is through the Document Object Model (DOM). The job of the DOM is to expose all the attributes of HTML and Style sheets to JavaScript control. All you need to know about the DOM is what JavaScript commands it accepts. Not that easy, as different browsers have their slightly different versions of the DOM, so they access HTML properties differently as well as display them differently.
So how do you locate an HTML element on a page and change its property? This is the job of JavaScript. Obviously, I cant into all the details of JavaScript or the DOM, but here is an example of how JavaScript can change a visibility of a style sheet layer in both browsers.
Note: That every piece of HTML has a location much like a directory in a phone book. When finding that piece of HTML you have to go through the same hierarchy process of searching for a name in the phone book such as
In JavaScript, a reference to this would be equivalent to
washington.seattle.j.jessica
Now Jessica may have additional information such as her address and phone number, so the JavaScript reference would be written this way.
washington.seattle.j.jessica.address
or
washington.seattle.j.jessica.phone
Lets transcribe the above metaphor to a DHTML document that contains a
layer [myLayer] with style attributes [top,left,width,height,z-index,visibility,etc] and the layer contains a bit of text "myText" (Note that the visibility attribute is set to hidden)
Now the previously hidden layer is now visible. This is essentially how DHTML works, but understand there are hundreds and hundreds of attribute properties for text, images, documents and windows. Not all these properties are supported in both browser and sometime accessing a property requires a few more hurdles, but if you stick to the common denominator properties both browser use then life it a bit easier. I recommend the excellent DHTML reference book Dynamic HTML - The Definitive Guide by Danny Goodman (O'Riley Books) It lists all of the DHMTL properties and their cross browser compatibilities.
About the Author
Eddie Traversa DHTML Nirvana http://nirvana.media3.net/ is a site dedicated to exploring the possibilites of DHTML. It hosts free graphics, dhtml templates and tutorials. Some of the tutorials emphasis is on Flash/DHTML integration.