I’m looking to create a menu bar and wonder if someone could give me some tips. At present I have created a single row table with the appropriate items and am looking to have a rollover on each cell, together with a cell specific drop down menu.
This is probably not the way to do it as the table will not expand but remains fixed. I believe there are actions that will do this but they don’t appear in my FWPro 5 menu.
The Actions don’t generally show up unless something that is a legal
target for that particular Action is selected. So if you have a page
Action, then it will generally be available no matter what, but if
it’s an object Action that requires being attached to a layer (for
example), if you have an image or a table or some other kind of
object selected, you won’t see the Action in the menu.
Walter
On Nov 13, 2008, at 3:42 PM, Tacitus wrote:
Hmm. I can read but since it doesn’t show up in my actions menu, I
thought I’d ask…
Sometime around 13/11/08 (at 11:28 -0500) Tacitus said:
I have created a single row table with the appropriate items and am
looking to have a rollover on each cell, together with a cell
specific drop down menu.
Actually, you’re trying to worry too much about the structure of
things. Don’t even think about table and cell structures! (And DON’T
try to use a table structure object as part of your basic layout
process!)
To make a menu using the CSS Menu actions…
Draw an HTML box,
Type your menu structure,
Format it as a list,
Select the HTML box itself and apply the CSS Menu action. Preview to see it.
Use the Actions palette to set it as either a vertical or a
horizontal menu, and use the other controls to decide how the menu
structure will look.
It is actually very simple to do and also exceptionally accessible
and search engine friendly… much better than doing this with real
tables! But you need to follow the right steps.
Thanks to all for the help. I’m still finding my round the FW5 interface. I did do a (very) simple site many years ago with an early version when CSS was in its infancy, so I’m more or less back to being a complete beginner.
At present I’m using a table based layout as my knowledge of HTML is pretty limited. Since I’m not very far advanced with the design, it might be better if I went back to the beginning and redid it entirely with CSS rather than try mixing a table based layout with CSS elements. It will be a steep learning curve but I’ve got to start somewhere. There does seem to be some rather odd effects going on with the current banner layout - a graphic laid on top of a full width HTML box, shouldn’t produce a vertical white bar in the centre.
Just be sure that when you say “making a table based layout” you don’t mean literally using the Table tool in Freeway, drawing out a table, and manipulating its properties and dimensions to lay out your page. If you do mean that, then understand that you are working harder than you need to and also probably compromising your layout efficiency.
When the big “CSS Layout” button is off, anything you draw in Freeway Pro (and this is always true for Freeway Express) will become a cell in an invisible, Freeway-managed HTML table. This table (or tables, depending on whether or not Freeway sees a gap in your layout to exploit) will be written and re-written every time you publish the page, and will always be as efficiently written as possible.
In contrast, if you draw a table and start filling it in with your content, you may or may not know to fill certain cells with clear GIF spacers, or to set the font size within others to 1px, etc. Freeway knows all these tricks and uses them ruthlessly.
Thanks for the reply Walt. No I’m not using the table tool to draw layout tables in the sense that you mean. It just seemed a simple way of constructing a menu bar, but I’ve now used the CSS menu action. That works but it breaks the layout and doesn’t seem as easy to revise, something which may be quite important as the site develops.
For my earlier site I could draw a wide HTML box and drop a Title graphic on top. The HTML box would expand to browser width whilst the graphic would more or less stay put. This no longer seems to happen despite my trying the ‘Group’ items tip in the manual. In the past I could even string together a row of alternating graphic and html items to get the layout the way I wanted it and FW never blinked.
Similarly, I’ve tried laying graphics buttons on top of an HTML box with a view to using those for navigation - a trick I used before with no problems and I could even add rollovers without any trouble. Now layouts seem to break at the slightest whim. I’ve tried dropping back to HTML 4.1 but that doesn’t seem to make much difference.
