always visible?

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always visible?

Post by ybouc »

I'm baaaaack ! :-P

I'm still working on the same old site as i was the last time (http://www.talieoh.com for those who remember, an adult site, you've been warned ! ;-) ), and i've encountered a little problem :

I have a menu where a sub-menu appears and it's height is higher than what's left in the visible portion of the page. So it appears higher than it should, in order to be entirely visible on the page without scrolling down, but this totally throws off the alignment. So I would like it to appear normally, and if you need to see the rest of the menu, you'd need to scroll the window down. What would be the setting for this ?
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Post by Ruth »

I tried putting in the address to check the menu, I get a page with nothing on it but images that don't load and just leave the little x in the outlined image box.

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Post by ybouc »

ugghhh... you're getting that too ? you're using IE6 with XP, right? We've had this problem for some time, and it just goes away by itself after a while! We have NO idea what the heck's going on with this... :-| anyways, try going right away to http://www.talieoh.com/welcome.html . But you won't be able to see the specific menu i'm talking about, because it is under the "member's" section...
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Post by Ruth »

I'm using IE5.5 win98. As to the menu, well I at least need to see it to see what's happening. From your description I can only suggest setting the submenuoffsets but that would set it for ALL the submenus. The other option would be to make a totally separate menu for that particular item, then you can set that submenu offset to what you need since it would be the only submenu on that menu. But, without seeing it, I have no idea if any of that really addresses the problem. Perhaps you could set up a page outside of the members area so we can see it...I realize that probably what's on the menu and page you dont' want out on any old page so maybe you could make a 'test' page with the same menu height etc so we can see it.

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Post by ybouc »

alright, here is a test page i just set up :

http://www.talieoh.com/test/test.html .

It's the "Members" sub-menu. There is also a bug which makes my sub-menus' horizontal offset appear incorrectly on the first display, but i'll get to that afterwards!

thanks!

Yannick
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Post by Ruth »

OK, I see what you mean. If I make my browser window very short then the submenus shift up. I don't know of any way just in the menu to fix that perhaps one of the others will, however I know there are functions and methods which deal with position. It's javascript and pretty much beyond me. Here's the link where you can see what's available. Methods and Functions Also, you are way down level on the menu, which may be some of the other problems you mention. You're at 5.06 I think and we are now at 5.26, there have been a number of fixes in those updates. If you go to the first topic under HELP and SUPPORT which is CURRENT MENU CODE RELEASE INFO and look for and click 'watch this topic' you will get an automatic notification when there is an update. You really need to update. The 3 files you upload are the milonic_src.js, mmenudom.js and mmenuns4.js. Make sure you keep your original 3 files in case you have problems so you can still use them while issues [if there are any] are resolved. But I used the new files and everything seemed to work fine, didn't have an offset issue, I don't think.

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Last edited by Ruth on Mon Jun 28, 2004 7:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by John »

As Ruth mntioned, you're 20+ versions down-level (some version numbers were used more than once), and you must upgrade for support. If you're interested, you can see all the fixes at http://milonic.com/menuvinfo.php.
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Post by ybouc »

alright, i upgraded the code on the test page, and i will be applying it to the entire site tomorrow, because that little bug i was gonna talk about seems to have been fixed !! yay ! ;-)

so now, back to the "Members" sub-menu though.... :-|

thanks !

Yannick
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Post by Ruth »

I'm sorry I can't help you with the submenu position issue. I think there is a way to set the submenu position based on it's parent's position using one of those functions. But functions are not my area.

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Post by kevin3442 »

Hi Yannick,

It seems that you're running into the menu system's built-in "anti collision" mechanism (or whatever they call it). If a menu is going to open in a place where one or more of its edges will be clipped by the browser window, the position is automatically adjusted to avoid clipping (or avoid collision with the browser edge).

I suppose Andy could introduce another global parameter that could be used to turn anti collision/anti clipping off. But that would require more work on his part, with what I'm sure is already a long to do list!

Barring that, Ruth may be on to another potential solution. There are several internal functions that could probably be used to position the submenu manually, relative to the position of its parent item in the main menu. That'd take a bit of recoding of how your main menu opens submenus and would require some creative application of javascript. Do you or one of your colleagues know js well enough to tackle the task?

Another possibility occurs to me. It seems to me that the anticollision methods do not come into play when opening a submenu from a horizontal main menu; if the bottom of the submenu would be clipped by the bottom of the browser window, and that submenu does not have overflow=scroll set, then the bottom simply gets clipped and a vertial scrollbar appears in the browser window. So... you could try redefining your main menu as four separate, horizontal main menus, each containing only one item, and positioned to appear as one vertical main menu. Don't know if that'd work (and haven't tested it), but I suspect that it would. One caveat... I don't know if the lack of collision adjustment for submenus opened from a horizintal parent is by design or an oversight. If by design, then no worries. If it's an oversight, and you get it to work that way, then you run the risk that the oversight will be corrected in a future release, and you'll be hosed when you update.

One other problem occurs to me. Suppose you do thwart the anticollision. You say that the user would then scroll down the page to see the rest of the menu. Seems to me that would only work if he or she used a mouse wheel to scroll the page, so that the pointer would remain in the menu to keep it active. If the user moved the pointer to the browser window's scroll bar, the menu would close because the pointer left it; the user would then have to re-open the menu... is that what you want? One possibility to negate that effect would be to use the menu's keepalive property, but I personally find that to be a little bit of a pain.

One final comment (yes, I'm feeling long winded, as ususal). Personally, I have liked the appearance of your submenus from the first time I saw them: it's cool the way you've positioned the submenu so that it's image aligns with the image in the parent item, to preserve the pink button as part of the overall menu effect. It's clear that you take pride in the look of the menu, as well you should. But you have to go to an awful lot of work to do it, and now you have even more work with this latest twist. I wonder if the site would suffer much if you just bagged preserving the pink button and opened a plain ol' rectangular submenu? I say this especially given the site's content: I doubt that the typical member spends much time admiring the look of the menu when there are clearly other aspects of the site to be, um... well... admired. ;) Just a thought.

If you are intent on keping the button look, you might try the multiple horizintal approach first, and see if that works for you. If not, the manual positioning is still an option.

Cheers,

Kevin
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Post by ybouc »

all i can say is : OUCH ! :-D and i thought there simply already was a setting in the menu program!

anyways, i don't think any of us knows JS enough to fiddle around with it in this case, and I've realized this: in 800x600, the menu appears correctly in a default IE/XP setting. On my setup i have 2 toolbars, and a double-height "Start" menu bar at the bottom, and if i just take out 1 bar, it appears correctly. So i'm guessing few people would stray away as far as I did from the default configuration, especially in 800x600, so it might not be THAT much of a concern after all (anything over 800x600 is fine anyways). What do you think?

As for scrapping the menu's look altogether... alright, here we go, I have to let it all off my chest, hope you have time to read.. :-P :

As you may know, initially the idea was to use PNG-24 graphics which would have allowed me to simply use the high-resolution transparency to have the same effect, but then we realized that IE wasn't totally compatible with it. However, in what now seems like an episode of foolish pride(!), I said: "sure, i can still do it, i'll just slice up JPEGs for each page".

Boy do I regret it now!! Indeed it does work exactly as initially designed, but it IS extremely tedious and time consuming to re-slice the menu for each new page that comes along. Thankfully almost all pages are now complete, and we have slightly changed the design of sub-pages in the members section (which will be the most frequently updated) to make things a bit simpler.

Yes I do sometimes feel like changing it altogether, but the site has not been online for very long, and actually the members' section is not even fully ready yet, so if I've done all this work, I would at least like SOME people to see it before I scrap it! LOL

so that's the story of me... :-D


But coming back to the alignment issue, what do you think? should I simply assume that people won't clog up their 800x600 windows with tons of toolbars like me? ;-)
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Post by kevin3442 »

Hi Yannick,
Yannick wrote:As you may know, initially the idea was to use PNG-24 graphics which would have allowed me to simply use the high-resolution transparency to have the same effect, but then we realized that IE wasn't totally compatible with it. However, in what now seems like an episode of foolish pride(!), I said: "sure, i can still do it, i'll just slice up JPEGs for each page".
Now that you remind me, I do recall the png issue. I don't blame you for forging ahead the way you did. I'm the same way about a lot of things... no matter how much work it takes, you want it to look or work the way you want it to look or work... period! The end result is usually worth the effort in my opinion. Of course, as you mention, once you start down that path, you're often committed until the bitter end!
I would at least like SOME people to see it before I scrap it! LOL
I can relate. Shows pride in your work... not a bad trait at all ;)
But coming back to the alignment issue, what do you think? should I simply assume that people won't clog up their 800x600 windows with tons of toolbars like me?
Well... I can give you my opinion, FWIW. (1) Now that the site's on line, what do the server logs tell you about the resolutions the visitors' are using? Are there a lot of 800x600 users? Of those that you do have, I agree that the average user probably would not have as much extra stuff on their screen as you have. (2) Has the client noticed the phenomenon? If so, have they complained? If not, bag it. If yes, you'll of course have to do something. (3) Have any site members complained? If not, then the client has no worries. If the client has no worries, then you have none.

In the meantime, perhaps Andy will read this and think... "Hmmm... I could make that option with one hand tied behind my back" and it may just appear in a future update. (Without wanting to speak out of turn, I don't think it would be a terribly difficult thing to add.)

If you do decide to tackle it, I think we could do it. We're here to help.

Cheers,

Kevin
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Post by ybouc »

Hey Kevin,

thanks a lot for your support!

I think you are definitely right; I have not had any complaint or comment regarding this issue so far, neither from the client nor from visitors, so I will assume everything is fine for now. ;-) Actually, I'm supposed to meet with the client this week, and they have their own "people" who'll go around the site to test it, so if nobody mentions anything, you can be sure i'll bag it... :-P . In fact, I told my partner about it, but i'm not even sure he remembers, so all the better... :-P

So I think I'm gonna keep it at that for now, i'll also check out the site's stats to see how many people are browsing at 800x600. And i'll keep you posted!

thanks again!

Yannick
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Post by Andy »

Hi,

After closer inspection I can see that this is a bug.

As you have specified a top position for the menu, the menu should be ignoring the collision detection.

This will be fixed in the next version due out soon.

Cheers
Andy
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Post by kevin3442 »

Wow! It doesn't get any better than that, right Yannick? Describe an issue... discuss solutions... uncover a bug... get a fix! All in a couple of days! Now that's service!

Cheers,

Kevin
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Post by John »

Expect to see the new version Thursday 1 July (hopefully!).
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Post by ybouc »

wow ! indeed this is fantastic news !! :-D
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