Questions

[j4]

Questions (mixed bag). Will swap for answers. All reasonable offers considered.

Glastonbury:

My mum is planning on going to Glastonbury. She's phoning me tonight (before ticket o'clock!) to ask about stuff. I'm worried that if I tell her the horrid bits (toilets, not being able to sleep EVER, etc.) she'll feel I'm trying to put her off going because I'm embarrassed about having parents there, but if I don't tell her, she'll be miserable when she's there. What do you reckon I should tell her?

Church:

The other day I got a mailshot from a church I used to go to. God knows (ha!) why they're sending me the 2002-03 newsletter, but anyway: they've included a "Do you want to stay on our mailing list?" card, and I definitely don't want to stay on their mailing list, but I'm wondering whether I should try to tell them why.

Sewing:

I want to learn the basics of sewing with a sewing machine. I have a very old hand-cranked sewing machine, and ideally I'd like to learn to use that -- a) because I already own it so I wouldn't have to buy one, and b) it's not as scary as electric ones. Would anybody be willing to teach me the very basic basics if I came round with a sewing machine? Will buy beer/food/etc. in return.

Web design:

Or, "Do my job for me". But seriously: I want to do some pages with tabbed sections, but with the tabs down the side of the page, displaying the sidebar menu for that section when that tab is selected (if that makes sense). What I'm looking for is examples where somebody else has already done this well, so I can a) convince people that it'll work, and b) get an idea of how to do it neatly.

Comments

[nja.livejournal.com]

Web stuff:

I used to have something similar as my work start page ("portal", if we're going to be pretentious). You can use the display:none attribute in CSS to hide the sub-menus and display only the headers, then use onclick to change the style to display:block, or in the context of a bunch of web pages where you're going to want different submenus to be displayed you can include the main menu with everything set as display:none, and then have an additional bit of CSS in each page to set the appropriate page sub-menu to display:block. I'll have a bash at this tomorrow and let you know if I have anything worth looking at. I'm pondering all this stuff at the moment because my work pages (http://www.le.ac.uk/eg/) are looking a bit sad. I have an inflexible corporate scheme which has to be included too, unfortunately.

Reading Lie and Bos's Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web tonight - it mentions "Indexing services like AltaVista, Hotbot and Lycos". Published in 1999 and the browsers are only just catching up.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Was this the sort of thing you were looking for?

http://www.engg.le.ac.uk/test/subdir/index.html

The menu on the right hand side drops down if you click on "Courses" or "Research". Making the submenus disappear again would require a bit of JavaScript, but it would be fairly easy to tidy it up. It's all done using CSS at the moment, works in IE6, Opera 7 and Firefox, and looks usable in Lynx. If you wanted the menu to be static with one of the submenus expanded depending on where the page was in the hierarchy, that would be even easier.

Today's tip: if you're fiddling around with the DOM, don't rely on a book on dynamic HTML printed in 1998.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Sorry, finally got round to looking at this, will reply email...