Dreamweaver Help! Urgent!!!

[wsteineker]

Hey guys, here's the deal. I've got a proof site due today and I have a major problem. Here goes. I've got a page designed that consists of 3 frames. Top frame is a static marquee. Second frame is a 15 pixel tall frame for a nav bar that consists of rollover images and pop up rollover menus that are supposed to drop down below the rollover images. Those two are a part of the same frameset. The third frame is a content window. Pretty standard layout.

The problem is that I've got the rollover images installed and they work no problem. I also built the pop up menus and installed all the links. Everything looked good in Dreamweaver. When I previewed the site, however, I got no pop up menus. The rollover images work as they should, but no dice on the actual menus. I've consulted the help files to no avail. What do I need to do to get those menus to appear and work properly? Please help. Any advice would be most appreciated, and you'd have my eternal grattitude. Maybe even a first born child or something. As you can see from my offer, I'm pretty desperate.

 

[mrjamin]

what browser are you using to test it? are the popup menus a 3rd party extension?

Post the site up somewhere on the net and i'll have a look myself if you like.

 

[moby1]

Post a link to your page so we can check it out.

A Dreamweaver haiku...

HTML wrong
Yellow tags of shame appear
No one hears your screams


- Glenn Pillsbury

 

[wsteineker]

Alrighty. The pop up menus aren't an extension, just behavior that I added. I cant' post yet because they don't want the old site offline until the new one is absolutely ready. Could it be that the originating frame is only 15 pixels high? I mean will the menu display in another frame immediately below it? If so, is there a work around for this sort of thing?

 

[mrjamin]

very difficult to understand what you mean without it being viewable! what browser are you using? it could be a browser thing. I have an array of pc/mac browsers here

 

[wsteineker]

I'm testing in Safari, Omniweb, iCab, Opera, IE, Mozilla, and Netscape. All are the newest Mac releases.

As for the menus, I'll try to be more specific. The top frame is the 60 pixel static marquee. Directly beneath that is the 15 pixel frame originally intended for the nav bar. The nav bar frame and the marquee frame are part of the same major frameset, and the bottom frame (content window) is a separate frameset.

The Nav bar frame consists of two basic parts. Rollover images and pop up menus. The rollover images are supposed to trigger the menus to drop down. All of the behaviors are properly installed. Everything checks out in Dreamweaver. This should work.

None of the browsers display the menus when I mouseover the rollover images. I am wondering if it's because the menus originate in a frame that's only 15 pixels wide. Do the menus have to be displayed in their originating frame or should they be dropping down into another frame?

 

[Rower_CPU]

You just answered your question about the menus...objects can't span multiple frames.

My advice: ditch the frames. They're an accessibility nightmare and make your site completely unusable on small screens.

 

[wsteineker]

Ok no problem. We can lose the frames. That raises another question, though. How do I implement the same design without them. I'm pretty new at this, and I'd like it to be as painless as possible.

I still need that 60 pixel banner at the top, followed by a 15 pixel strip that actually works with rollovers, followed by a relative size window. What should I do if not frames?

 

[Rower_CPU]

A simple table-based layout should to the trick.

<table width="100%">
	<tr>
		<td height="60">Banner</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td height="15">Navigation</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>Content</td>
	</tr>
</table>

 

[wsteineker]

Thanks a million, man. I really appreciate it. I am totally buying you a beer next time I'm in San Diego.

 

[superfunkomatic]

yeah i agree get rid of the frames, with the functionality issues you are having specifically caused by using frames.

if you are familiar with server side includes use them, build your nav out of one single file and include it in the others. that way if you change your nav you only have to change one file, not every page. it's under the insert -> script objects in dreamweaver. the include file has to have all head elements removed and the html tag removed. and tables is definitely the correct route.

www.webmonkey.com had a tuturial on includes at one point on their site. there is more info on the apache.org site on how to configure the server as well.

in most instances it's easier to scrap the frames and rebuild than to monkey-about with frames.

hope that helps.