- Introduction
- The Concept: "Sliding" Menu Table in a Navigation Frame
- The DHTML in the Nav Menu
- The JavaScript "Slides" a New Menu into the Top Table Row
- Final Thoughts: Opportunities for Improvement
- References
- Conclusion
Final Thoughts: Opportunities for Improvement
This solution met the requirements and, as is often the case, had the virtue of being the last iteration prior to a fixed delivery date. Given infinite time for progressively better versions, I'm sure that a more flexible and manageable solution would evolve. For instance, this was built for and tested in an IE5 browser environment only. It may need to be adjusted for display by Netscape or other browsers.
One annoyance is that the swapping of images tends to cause a slight flicker in the menu bar. I experimented a bit with DHTML transition and alpha filters with only mild success in ameliorating this effect but more work could be done here.
Finally, there are several approaches to manipulating HTML elements on the fly using DHTML including the innerHTML, outerHTML, and insertAdjacentHTML methods. These might provide a more concise manipulation of the attributes of the <img> tag used for the menus than the TextRange solution.