lecture 10: menus

Most of the time, frames are used for navigation, although as I've said, you should really think about them as a means of presenting multiple and interrelated texts on screen simultaneously. However, seeing as the topic of navigation has come up, to close this lecture here are a couple more suggestions for getting different-looking menus on the screen. The online teaching materials also include some general hints and tips for navigation.

These buttons have onclick events coded into them, as follows:

This is a reasonable alternative to using images as links. As lecture 9 mentioned, buttons are, on the whole, more robust than images. If you style these buttons you can also make them look rather better than the standard black-on-grey. This technique still works with keyboard-only users as well (just tab onto the buttons and press Return). The disadvantage is that it's hard to control the size of buttons and things can look a little untidy, as you see - although centering them has helped a bit.

You can also use form selection boxes to get a "drop-down menu" of links, which is very much more economical with space: see the example below. The full code for this box is on the handout (and in the online teaching materials). Note that this technique is not accessible to those who only browse with a keyboard, so should be used with discretion.

The page devoted to these matters in the online teaching materials also covers the topic of site maps - have a look at it to see what I mean by this.

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lecture 10: menus