[Questions] Formatting of Placeholder Text

[jclements]

I've been experimenting with placeholders and text strings contained within them.

I am interested in formatting tags that can be used to altered the attributes of the text and if there is a way to modify the "background" color or "border" style of the Placeholder display.

In particular, I want to have the Placeholders on the MouseOver layer so Buttons can be used to hide their display until the Button is clicked. The MouseOver layer does control the how text is displayed, so I wondering also if there are "secret" ways of getting around this.

The attached .Web file demonstrates some the things I've been experimenting with and discovered. Any suggestions you have (.web examples would be helpful) are welcome.

JC

[slavelle]

why not use a seperate popup layer instead of the mouseover layer? this way, you don't have to worry about the "rules" of the mouseover layer and will have a little more control. Then, just create the popup layer for each thing you want popped up, which can have the placeholder code in it and can have whatever formatting you want, not to mention it's ability to be completely outside of the object that is being hovered.

[jclements]

If you've got a lot of popups (like 50 or so per page) that is a lot of layer creation and linking.

[slavelle]

I suppose you could do what I did in an xtreme site I was working on, and that is to make an invisible rectangle grouped with the box you want the mouseover on and then the mouseover layer can go over the whole combined size - iow: this would allow the mouseover layer to display something that looks larger than the object is over. Does that make sense?

My example was a nav bar, where the mouseoff layer contained a cardboard box for each area of the site. when the boxes were hovered, a the top would open and show color inside that box. Since the mouseover object was twice as tall as the box it sat on top of, I had to make the underlying box area actually as big as the thing I wanted to show on the mouseover layer. Worked out pretty well for the simple example.

All I was suggesting is that the popup laters would give you a lot more flexibility, but if you are going to have tons of "contact records" I can see how it would be a bit laborious. Some of the layer stuff in xwd is a little clunky, but the end-results are cool and otherwise really difficult to obtain with standard html/css coding.

[jclements]

Slavelle, what you mentioned in the first paragraph in your posting above, reflects what I've discovered earlier this a.m.!

{Edit][Another consideration is constructing a web page that is reasonbly attractive (think template) that others can update data easily with a minimum of instruction. In my office it could potentially be a receptionist or word processor (even, heaven forbid, someone in marketing ) doing updates to a page on our Intranet.[/Edit]

I just want to know how I can leverage this feature to the max. so that I can evaluate if it is appropriate to use in a future project.

The two bottom clickable rectangle at the bottom page use Selection menus and tables, and allow other flexibility like autoexpanding horizontally like a stretchy buttons. Their formating is still a mystery to me and am also hoping there some other javacript forms availble to try. They do allow you to place listed info in a very small, clickable area.

Can you post a link to the site you created using Xtreme?

[covoxer]

Possibility to use plain text on mouseover/mousedown layers will be added in the following update.

[jclements]

Possibility to use plain text on mouseover/mousedown layers will be added in the following update.

Okay, John (Covoxer), what do you want for a reward? ... THANK YOU for your foresight!

[slavelle]

jclements: I will try to find it and post it for you to look at. The client has not moved on it in months, so I have sort of let it lie dormant. I was really using Xara for the mockup and planning on doing it "for real" in html/css.

[slavelle]

Found it. None of the links are live, but it should give you an idea with the expanding boxes taking more space than the object that they are a mousover layer of.

Check it here: http://www.technicalrs.com/pkgatl/testsite/

[jclements]

Very nice. I can see I've a lot to learn