Am working on version 0.2 of my MT Courseware for next quarter. The drop-down “QuickLinks” menu didn’t work from an interface standpoint, so I decided to add tabbed navigation elements at the top of the content area. Since I’m teaching web design next quarter, and one of the goals of the class is to get them to renounce table-based and non-standards-compliant authoring, I figured putting in a table-based, Fireworks-generated DHTML menu would be a bad example.
So instead I turned to the wonderful A List Apart, which has great articles on CSS-based navigation—and a great example in their own new design.
After a lot of css and xhtml tweaking, I finally got the effect that I wanted, which can be seen on the new course site. (Again, since it’s a production course site, please don’t leave comments there…)
The most frustrating part was getting it to work perfectly in Mozilla and Safari, only to find that in IE5/Mac instead of a horizontal navigation bar I suddenly had a vertical bar. I don’t even want to tell you how many hours it took for me to discover that the problem was carriage returns in the html for my unordered list. Aaargh.
At the moment, I think it works cross-browser, cross-platform; I tested it in IE6/WinXP via Virtual PC, as well as my Mac browsers. If it’s not working your configuration, let me know in the comments here.
Once I’m sure I’ve squashed the bugs, and cleaned up the categories and css a bit, I’ll post the new templates.
Took another peek tonight at the search terms that are bringing people to my site—they’re often informative, and sometimes quite entertaining.
Tonight I discovered that I’m currently the number one hit in Google for “hoppy toad” and the number two hit for “happy dance.” Great juxtaposition!
It makes me a little sad to see that there are anumber of people getting to my site based on searches like “os x mail has lost all my emails”—I feel their pain. Wish I had better news for them.
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