I’ve seen some sites where the navigation strip on the left is a flash file and when you click on links the main portion of the window displays the page but html.
What program do you use to do this? And any tutorials?
you can do this with dreamweaver. Dreamweaver actually can import flash buttons (in a frame if you want) and when clicked it will either open a new window or show the HTML page on the main FRAME.
Frontpage will also do that, just click in ‘import’ and select the flash movie. works better with tables.
but with tables you need to reload the flash elements, where as with frames, you can load your navigator once, and have it control the whole rest of the movie placement. I find Frames to be the preferable way of going, and hope that it will become the standard for building web pages.
The problem with frames has always been that search engines could not understand what they were getting at. Hence a lot of confusion when someone logs onto the HTML page by itself and realizes, or sometimes doesn’t, that there is no way of navigating around.
I believe, with the new protocols, and a proper naming convention for your site, you can avoid this problem. I know Google now understands frame sets very well.
Try it both ways. See which one works best for you. If your flash navigator is small enough, (25k or less) you’ll likely find no problem with, and an easier time, doing your pages with tables/cells.
Upu’, there’s a way (javascript) to detect if your content-page is displayed in it’s frameset (thus with the navigation frame), and if isn’t, to reload the whole frameset!
I agree, one frame for the navigation, stays in place, no need to reload, and one for the content, well integrated, and you get a good site. Bear in mind though that once your navigation elements have downloaded once, normaly they’re cached and will display very quickly even without frames…
too true. My biggest problem is that I don’t want to have it reload. That is, I don’t usually want my timeline to start at frame one. I’ve been working around this currently, by calling to a variable which in each web page the swf is embeded in. That variable tells the flash player to go somewhere and be in the state that I want it in. It’s a workable solution, but a pain in the @$$ compared to frames.
Another nice aspect of frames is, if you have large swfs to load, you can have other stuff open and active for the visitor to brows through. Keeps em distracted.
So, do you know where I can get at least one sample of that code?
Uhm…I admit I don’t remember right now where this code is; only thing I do remember is (if you use Dream!) there’s an extension called s’thing like bust frames on MM-exchange, BUT I do not recall if that’s it…I’ll look in my backups 'nd get back 2 ya…sorry.
Couldn’t remember where I had it, but here’s a link where to copy/paste it :
javascript.internet.com/p…ector.html
Seemed to me there was a shorter script, searched…here’t is:
http://javascript.internet.com/page-details/break-frames.html
(poke around, maybe others, it’s all cut’n’paste, really helpfull)