Frames, URLs Question

[standay]

OK folks, here's my problem. I have created a set of 9 XaraX nav buttons. I export them. If I then open the first page of exported buttons and click different buttons, it *seems* to work. Everything works, "selected" buttons update correctly (i.e., you click the "download" page and the "download" button becomes "selected"). But I don't want to use seperate pages in the web site, I want to use frames. Herein, the problem...

If I setup a simple 2-frame frames page (Frontpage98), and put the first page of exported buttons into the left hand frame and have the button URLs changing pages in a right hand frame, the "selected" XaraX nav button never changes. The URLs work, the pages change in the right hand frame, but the buttons in the left hand frame don't update. I want the buttons to update like they do when they are on pages by themselves, but within a frames structure.

Any ideas welcomed. HELP!!!

Stan

[standay]

OK folks, here's my problem. I have created a set of 9 XaraX nav buttons. I export them. If I then open the first page of exported buttons and click different buttons, it *seems* to work. Everything works, "selected" buttons update correctly (i.e., you click the "download" page and the "download" button becomes "selected"). But I don't want to use seperate pages in the web site, I want to use frames. Herein, the problem...

If I setup a simple 2-frame frames page (Frontpage98), and put the first page of exported buttons into the left hand frame and have the button URLs changing pages in a right hand frame, the "selected" XaraX nav button never changes. The URLs work, the pages change in the right hand frame, but the buttons in the left hand frame don't update. I want the buttons to update like they do when they are on pages by themselves, but within a frames structure.

Any ideas welcomed. HELP!!!

Stan

[krayzie_juggalo]

Hey i cant help you out but u can help me out i think.

How do u make nav bar buttons? when i try it comes up saying that i cant make them or something like that.

[Wolfgang]

standay,

there really is no reason, why your buttons would not work as usual when in a frame set.

Well, OK, there's one: Unlike the latest version, Frontpage98 is changing your HTML-code to its liking. This means, if you import your ready page into Frontpage98 and save the page there once, the code will be changed.

Sometimes FP98 does too much of a job and deletes embedded JavaScript without warning.

Please try the following:

* Create your frameset and everything in FP98 (you should have that right now).

* Once more export your NavButtons including HTML from Xara X.

* IMPORT your new Nav-files into FP98 - OVER the current ones.

* Do NOT open or save the Nav-files in Frontpage.

* Try it in your browser, it should work now

If it DOES work, you have found a workaround to your problem. To really solve it, upgrade to Frontpage2000, it is much better in almost every aspect.

Wolfgang

[diniel]

Stan,

You if you want to change two frames with one click, there are two ways of doing it. The first is to use some javascript which will let you change two frames with one link - but if you're not familiar with JS, it can be quite daunting.

The easier way, epspecially as you only want 9 sets of pages, is to create a left frame, right frame and frameset for each page that you want on your navbar.

For example, if you had a download, contact us and about us page on your site, you can create a frameset for each page - called for example download.html

Then have that frameset page show downloadmenu.html in the left frame, and downloadbody.html in the right frame.

That way, you have a menu page for each page, which can change according to which section of the site is selected.

It is normally much better, however, to avoid using frames when at all possible, because you then have to being catering for the possibility someone arrives at your site on the page downloadmenu.html - then what?! - they don't see the site as you had hoped, until they click on a link (but they may be scared off before then).

[standay]

Thanks for the help and suggestions. Here's what I did...

I remade the buttons but did *not* create a "selected" state for any of them. Once I did that it seemed to work OK (although they do not preview correctly in FP98 which is no big deal).

The only way I could see to include the "selected" states was to use some javascript to load the appropriate "selected" state buttons page into the frame. While I do know how to do this, since this is just for my own website and I have to maintain what I put up there I wanted to keep it relatively simple, which meant no messy JS to maintain.

Also, I went with frames as I just could no longer do what I wanted to do on the site without them.

If you are interested in the final result, go to

web page

Stan