Need help from HTML afficionados

Hi All

At long last I've found some time to get my website up to date, I've a design in mind and I'm a good way towards getting it how I envisage but I'm having one particular problem I just can't work out..........................

Basically the site is one page with a transparent window, menus and content are on apDiv layers which hide or show when required by mouse clicks. The problem I'm having is showing my image galleries. I've created four galleries with Flash with both Flash and HTML output with the intention of using the HTML gallery only. The gallery is created as a page called gallery.html. the question is how (if I can) show gallery.html on a apDiv layer.

I know I can get by with using an apDiv for each image but this becomes a bit of a nightmare with the show/hide command, I suppose I can allways use Frames but I read somewhere that this is old hat (is it?) and not very cross browser friendly......Oh! before I forget I'm using Dreamweaver CS3.

All help appreciated

Frames is only old hat when it comes to search engines (they hate frames, probably because so many abused them!)

However, there are easier ways to deal with frame-like setups. For example SSI (server side includes) can simulate frames for you - for example your menu and title can be done as an SSI and then each page can easily load the common parts.

If you really want to load a div with HTML, then you can do this with AJAX techniques. Particularly the Javascript XMLHttpRequest method That'll allow you to hook back a page of data and then you can inject it straight into the div with Javascript.

Sounds messy, and it's a right royal pain to test on multiple browsers...

...maybe you should look at SSI instead
Matt

I think you could use an inline frame (iframe), set within its own css element, so that when the element was made visible you would see the framed content.

However, the main problem with frames is that the search engines get confused by them. As long as there's not content within them that you want to be indexed and searchable they're generally fine (I think modern browsers all fully support frames these days). If you want people to be able to search for your images, then frames may not be the way to go.

I use iframes on my website, for the menu bars, a couple of small elements like the copyright notice, and the 'advert' box on the right hand side (the bit that says about workshops on the home page). Although I want the info in the menu bars to be indexed, the links they contain are all on the homepage 'index.htm' anyway.

Hope that helps, if I think of anything else I'll come back to you.

By the way, I'll have to look up 'apDiv', as I'm used to simple 'Div's.

Dan

Thinking about it, probably the easiest way would be to just copy the relevant code from your 'gallery.html' page into an 'apDiv' element and treat it like any other. Obviously this may depend on how the code is written, but I don't see it being a problem.

However, it would be advisable for you to ensure the elements on your page load in the correct order, i.e. the things you want people to see first, load first. You don't want the hidden elements loading, and they may take a while if there are plenty of thumbnails, without first ensuring the main, initially visible ones, have done so, otherwise people will be looking at a blank screen wondering what's going on.

Dan

Hi Guys

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

I had the same thought as I was driving home, unfortunately, Flash does not output a Flash and a HTML gallery as I first thought, it outputs the flash gallery written into an HTML page

I only have basic+++ knowledge of HTML, AJAX etc. are allien to me at the moment, maybe when I find some more free time I'll do some learning. In the mean time I'll use what knowledge I have to build my own galleries using Div layers (apDiv in Dreamweaver CS3).

First edition is up for testing purposes www.brianlawson.co.uk still loads to do and figure though.

Should be able to do the same thing though, just copy the html which references the flash file. I was going to say "If you upload the flash gallery I'll see if I can integrate it into your page", but then I took a look at your source code and thought "Woah!" I usually leave the javascript in a seperate file and link to it - looks a bit frightening!

Need to sort out how to get back to the 'home page', at the moment you can't get rid of the model, well I can't anyway.

The new home page I'm working on (very slowly, haven't done anything with it for a couple of months), uses visibility changes and a flash object in a Div element, it's at www.DanielBridge.co.uk/zoomify

The image you can zoom in on is a flash object, and doing a mouse over the pics on the left hand side changes the visibility of the info boxes, and the 'sitemap' link just changes the z-index of the sitemap element.

Dan

Hi Dan

I see what you are proposing I do but I wanted a Flash free site, if I can't get the site to look right and work well I'll maybe have to have a rethink and do the whole lot in Flash (more learning). The complicated/messy code is being generated by the Project 7 extensions I'm using to create the layer translations, will have to do some reading to find out if I can do as you say (link back to file) or take Matt's advice and try SSI's (this stuff make your head hurt

Love the zoomify bit on your page, nice for macro stuff where you just want to see it even closer.