A few days ago…the usual suspects (Lost, EG etc) were talking about how DHTML menus look “tacky”. I just saw some in the link that is in the thread titled “top of my page”. They seemed ok to me…could easily be done in Flash but why are they tacky? (-:
I don’t know where you got that from, but I don’t recall saying they’re tacky. I use to work with DHTML before I got into flash and thought that it was really cool, the only problem was that it wasn’t compatible with all browsers.
yeah… well, what sucks about them is when you try to print a page… it prints the menus, and your page goes to hell…
I think it’s better to do dropdown menus in javascript
ok well maybe it wasn’t you EG, sorry. I know some people were definitely saying how they were tacky though :-\
I love DHTML menus! I really want to make one like the one at mediatemple.com
Yeh I dont think they are tacky and they shouldn’t of said that.
those are really cool. Do you guys have a site, where i can learn it?
I said that depending on how it is used they can be good/cool, but in many cases they are tacky.
And it was Rev, abzoid, and I that were talking about them.
hm hm, so where can u learn it ?
Is there something like w3school.com ?
Do you know HTML, CSS, and Javascript???
If not, screw DHTML, learn those first.
DHTML is a combination or all 3 of those, and it is incredibly tedious to learn and do. I go back to it every now and then, but overall it is incredibly hard (at least for me).
i know html, css and php. but now javascript.
So how do/did you learn it?
I know bits and pieces of it. Mostly from experimentation and www.webmonkey.com and tutorials that I searched for through google.
eh… dhtml is easy, and I learned it by mistake. I used to use GoLive to make my pages… and I learned the trick of using floating text boxes to make menus and stuff… I got into other things, and since I like working with code, I was constantly editing the html GoLive generated… and that’s how I learned DHTML.
However, I’m not sure if it’s even worth it to learn it… I’ve seem some code out there for menus that is generated with XML… and it’s a LOT easier…
If you’re going to learn something, learn XML… that’s the HUGE thing that businesses are going to start asking for.
Yeah, XML is slowly becoming the new standard.
And DHTML is not easy, its easy to edit, but not easy to create from scratch and have work cross browser.
That is unless you are fluent in it, then it’s both.
http://www.htmlguru.com/ :beam:
Hm, I don’t know. I looked at XML and I was really dissapointed. I thought it would be something fantastic but actually it isn’t that good. To store data I would really recommend a db like mysql. XML is something for people that don’t have a db… Or am I wrong ?
it’s not for STORING information… it’s for LABELING information… This allows for interaction between different applications and databases, whether they’re online or not…
Let’s say you’re at amazon.com - normal HTML code would just say:
information
<ul>
<li>Artist: bla blah</li>
<li>Song: blah blah</li>
<li>Album: blah blah</li>
</ul>
of course, YOU know what this means, but if there’s a program entering this data into a database, or a spider indexing the page, it doesn’t clearly know what it represents (it would have to parse the text)
However, with xml you can do things like this:
<artist>blah blah</artist>
<song>blah blah</song>
<album>blah blah</album>
a database program knows EXACTLY how this information is labeled. But if you don’t get why XML is so freaking awesome yet, let me give you an example. XML is not just to help database programs know where to put information.
How can chemists exchange the chemical composition of a molecule over the internet? Doing this in html is hard… and how do you know the STRUCTURE of the bonds?
this is an example of how the water molecule is described in XML
<MOL TITLE = "Water">
<ATOMS>
<ARRAY BUILTIN = "ELSYM">H O H</ARRAY>
</ATOMS>
<BONDS>
<ARRAY BUILTIN = "ATID1">1 2</ARRAY>
<ARRAY BUILTIN = "ATID2">2 3</ARRAY>
<ARRAY BUILTIN = "ORDER">1 1</ARRAY>
</BONDS>
<MOL>
The labels are part of the “Chemical Markup Language” (CML). A browser that is CML enabled will display the image of the structure of the water molecule.
Other areas that are benefited by XML include music composition, and writing math equations. Also… Shakespeare. In an XML shakespeare play, all the lines are correctly tagged by speaker. Lets say that you wanted your browser to display ONLY the lines spoken by Romeo… you could do that very easily with XML.
Of course, these kinds of things have been done before when people write applications that parse text. However, the important aspect about XML is that it’s very easy to use, you don’t need to know anything about how the parser works, and it’s quickly becoming a standard. Microsoft Office soon will be based on XML - this means that you could write a flash application that would let you edit your word documents… isn’t that neat?
