Followscrolling off bottom of page

Poster: marksm
Dated: Wednesday March 30 2005 - 7:06:50 BST

Hello,

I wrote about an issue back in May, 2004 titled "Scrolling Navigation Bar Anomoly" and was wondering if anyone since then had any new ideas on how to fix this. The issue is that when you have a browser window that's shorter than your "followscrolling menu" you can never scroll to the bottom of the page.

To see this, go to my website (http://www.theapplesmith.com/new234/index.html) and take your window off of MAXIMIZE. If you reduce the height of the window enough and start using the scroll bar to scroll down, you can get it to where my nav bar contents scroll off the bottom of the page. As long as you keep dragging the scroll bar down, it will keep scrolling to infinity, never reaching a "bottom of page."

QUESTION: Is it possible to make the followscroll value automatically switch to zero depending on browser window size and/or screen resolution? These two factors seem to affect the problem I have. If not, are there any other ideas?

Thanks,

Mark

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Tuesday April 5 2005 - 0:19:17 BST

Hi Mark,
I just saw this and figured I'd look at it, though I was pretty sure it would be more than I know how to do. So, what I see is, you have menus which combined are x pixels high on that left side, and you have followscroll set. So, if someone makes the browser screen smaller than the height of the menu, they can never see what ends up of the screen when they make the window real small because when they try using the scroll bar the menu begins scrolling as it is set to do. The only solutions I figured were:

1. Make an image you can put someplace that you use as a totally different menu, set it to followscroll and set the link to be target=top, and fix your main menus to be fixed position and not move.

2. change your layout so that that area to the right is an iframe, which would mean the left side with the menu would not move, only the iframe would. You'd have to code the menu to load pages in the iframe.

3. See if it's possible to have a function created to check the window size, and turn off followscroll when it is less than a specific height. I think that would mean it would have to be able to check the window on first load, to also know when someone resized the window, and to figure the new size, then read the size you have set in the function and if it's smaller tell the menu that since it is smaller than the size listed turn off the followscroll.

Those are the only things I can think that would work, unless you go to frames when the frames module is ready. It is in the works and pretty close to being done.

Ruth

Poster: marksm
Dated: Tuesday April 5 2005 - 2:01:52 BST

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for taking a look. I appreciate your input.

I like option #3 the most, but, not being a code type (I used Dreamweaver to do my website) I'm not sure how you interrogate one's browser window to check its size and have it set followscroll accordingly. Does anybody know how to do this?

What I've done recently is to merely try to minimize the height of my navigation menu to reduce the number of folks who will experience the problem. I also put stuff at the bottom of my menu that folks wouldn't REALLY need to see, like our address (they can see it under Contact Us if they want).

I really like the menu always being there for users no matter where they are on a page. I've read negative things about frames, hence, the followscroll feature of Milonic's DHTML menu is what really drew me to it.

Thanks,

Mark

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Tuesday April 5 2005 - 6:00:36 BST

Well, I think the function might be pretty involved since it has to do things to the menu programming.

As to frames, I think they get a bum rap. They work well, unless you get people who nest framesets in framesets already nested in framesets ad infinitum. Your site would lend itself nicely to a frame layout. It would also do well with with an iframe, though that does have problems with the old netscape browsers in the 4x numbers.

Ruth