Why no PlaceMenu()? New approach cannot be cached

Poster: fen __at__ changegroup.dk
Dated: Tuesday February 15 2005 - 23:34:09 GMT

I realize that a bunch of articles have been posted already regarding the obsolete PlaceMenu() function. But it gives us serious headaches that you don't honor backward compatibility.

We have been using 3.4.05 for a few years now and we've been quite happy with it. But now we would like to add keyboard support to enable menu navigation without using the mouse. In order to do that we've tried to upgrade to the latest relase. Much to my surprise I learnt that the API isn't backward compatible (one of the extremely few cases in my 18+ years career that I've come across that). It's great if the converter can convert into something else, but seen that there's no alternative to PlaceMenu() one will have to completely restructure the code for absolute positioning inside a table cell. And much worse, having all these small scripts scattered all around inside the HTML the browser will no longer be able to cache the JavaScript (with the old version we placed all the declarations inside a .js file). One would think that there must be a better solution?

Do we have another alternative for keyboard-enabling version 3.4.05?

Best regards,

Finn Ellebaek

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Wednesday February 16 2005 - 2:39:42 GMT

Nothing has been done on version 3 for a long time, years. It is no longer supported, though there are archived topics for help. I think the reason there's no backward compatibility is because, at least in my understanding, version 5 wasn't an upgrade of the existing version 3 program, it's a new program. Version 3 didn't have tab access for submenus and such.

I'm not clear on the other things you mentioned [I'm not real knowledgeable] but you don't absolute position version 5 in a table cell. The way the menu works in tables, so that it is cross-browser compatible since they seem to render tables differently, you place only the main menu into the table cell setting position="relative", it can either be done by placing the main menu itself inside script tags, or it can be done by placing the main menu in a file which you call at that location. The rest of the menu gets called by having the js calls for the files the first item after the body tag. It has something to do with having to have all the submenus built before the main menu is rendered on the page when it's in the table like that.


Table Menu Information You can get more information on the hows, whys and wherefores at that link.

Ruth

Poster: fen __at__ changegroup.dk
Dated: Wednesday February 16 2005 - 10:24:48 GMT

Thanks for your reply. Well. We have two different menu systems and one of them (not positioned inside a table) seemed to work well with IE 6.0. But it doesn't work with NN 4.05 at all (JavaScript errors), NN 6.1 (one of the menu items keeps growing every few seconds) and the keyboard interface doesn't work at all with OP 6.01.

So we have to abandon the usage of the newest version and go back to 3.4.05. Very disappointing.

Cheers,

Finn

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Wednesday February 16 2005 - 17:40:01 GMT

Hi Finn,
If you could post a link to the page with the new one, we could test and see what's going on. It's hard if we don't have the page to see if it's something that is fixable. Or you could contact milonic support from the home page under support.

Ruth

Poster: aaronz
Dated: Wednesday February 16 2005 - 19:09:52 GMT



This sounds exactly like the problems I'm having with NN 4.7/6.x with the newest version. I just started a thread about it called "browser compatibility" ... interesting to hear that this hasn't always been a problem with older versions.

Aaron