2nd Re: drop-down navigation (fwd)

I have sent you Joe Clark's full message to which Richard Chimera
replied, see appended below.

Addressing Joe Clark's first point, Richard Chimera responded that
DHTML supports such things as drop-down navigation boxes and:

"Internet Explorer 5.0 supports Microsoft's DHTML (Dynamic HTML,
 which has been submitted to W3C and will almost certainly be accepted as
 major advances in the next version of HTML)."

What does WAI have to say about this DHTML proposal?

Cheers,

John 
--
Forwarded message follows:

>Date:         Thu, 10 Feb 2000 11:55:10 -0700
>Reply-To: Richard Chimera <richard.chimera@JDA.COM>
>Sender: "ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (Open Discussion)" <CHI-WEB@ACM.ORG>
>From: Richard Chimera <richard.chimera@JDA.COM>
>Subject:      interactivity without Java (was RE: Drop-down navigation boxes -
>              button or no button?)

>Joe Clark <joeclark@THEBRML.ORG> writes:
>
>> 1. Options are hidden. Options should not be hidden, according to
>> many people. (The use of "hidden information spaces"-- submenus that
>> appear only when you mouseover a button-- is contentious. It works in
>> many cases but is nonobvious and requires Java.
>
>Addressing that last sentence, many others have stated that Java is required
>for mouseover activities on web pages, and I can no longer sit idly by and
>let a major fact continue to go unstated on this newsgroup.  I have no
>strong allegiances to Microsoft over Sun/Netscape/Java/whatever, but it is a
>fact that Internet Explorer 5.0 supports Microsoft's DHTML (Dynamic HTML,
>which has been submitted to W3C and will almost certainly be accepted as
>major advances in the next version of HTML).  DHTML has additional
>attributes for almost all HTML elements including TR, TD, INPUT, etc.,
>called "onmouseover", "onmouseout", "onfocus", "onblur" (lose focus), and
>scores of others.  These take as values Visual Basic Script or Java Script
>subroutine names and parameters.  For example, within a <TABLE> element I
>have DHTML code that looks like this:
>    <TR onmouseover='mouseOver(this)'
>        onmouseout='mouseOut(this)'
>        class='UnhighlightedRow'>
>Notice that DHTML even provides an object-based approach (called DOM, the
>Document Object Model, which gives programming access to HTML elements as
>objects) and even allows you to specify the keyword THIS as a parameter
>meaning whatever HTML element receiving the event, in this case the TR
>element.  In those two subroutines I change the value of the class attribute
>(tying in the CSS mechanism for presentation specifications) for the row to
>alternate among 'HighlightedRow' and 'UnhighlightedRow'.  One could do any
>number of things including changing a gif image to a highlighted version,
>make changes to other HTML elements' attributes using DOM, or any number of
>things.  See MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) at msdn.microsoft.com, type
>"DHTML" in the search box, and browse from there for an overview and
>details.
>
>I repeat, Java is not necessary to do amazingly interactive things on a
>DHTML web page.  The DHTML is all text and downloads very quickly compared
>to the bigger Java applets.  Yes, I understand that IE 5.0 is not
>everywhere, designing for text browsers should not be ignored, etc.  I
>simply did not want a major development approach to be ignored on this
>newsgroup.
>
>Sincerely,
>+Rick Chimera
>
>Richard Chimera, Design Council
>richard.chimera@jda.com
>JDA Software, #1 in Software for Retail Businesses
>www.jda.com

-- 
Access the word, access the world       Tel/fax +44 20 8742 3170/8715
John Nissen                             Email to jn@tommy.demon.co.uk
Cloudworld Ltd., Chiswick, London, UK   http://www.tommy.demon.co.uk

Received on Saturday, 12 February 2000 06:06:01 UTC