I know FP Themes were a right buggy mess but if they were only used for
navigation, it made maintaining a nav structure easy and quick.

Have I missed something as I do not want themes back but have not Microsoft
included some automated way of creating navigation in EWD.

I have used the brilliant and most well written first tutorial at:
http://www.expression-web-designer-help.com and would like to thank them for
their tutorial.
However meunu creation is extremely long winded in css, so if there is no
internal menu building system, that is relatively quick and easy would the
experts recommend reverting back to the wide array of java script meus that I
have used over the years, or is all that stuff now the devils work if
validation is king.

As a general comment IMHO FrontPage could be used by many people to get a
basic web design up quite easily and more expert designers could make
attractive design and complex use fairly easily. EWD in comparison is more an
experts program, not really user friendly and extremly difficult to produce
pretty designs from unless you are a CSS university guru.
Does anyone agree - could Microsoft not provide something in there to make
it less of a mountain to climb for the validation cause and a more easy to
use tool for the practical purpose of what you want a website to do in
business?

Thank you for taking the time to follow part one of our site building
tutorial. And for your kind comments.
CSS menus really are not that difficult and the following tutorials in the
series look at building both horizontal and vertical menus whilst trying to
use a number of techniques to help the user become more at ease with css.
Once incorporated into a DWT or Master page, the updating and addition of
said menus becomes very simplistic. As with all things the preparation will
effect the end result. IMHO I would not tend toward any other method. You
could make use of any number of CSS menu making sites, to quickly create the
code that you would just paste into you page. An example site -
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-w...ic/default.php
Alternatively, you could rip a menu from and existing pre built expression
web template. So many different ways to do the same thing. Ultimately the
satisfaction and time spent creating your own will be richly rewarded. Stay
tuned though as we are working on a xml menu!
Good luck
Jim http://www.expression-web-designer-help.com
"PhilSense" <PhilSense> wrote in message
news:a85e
[..]

I agree those tutorials are very informative and thank the person who
created them. The link below also seems very useful. However, in many
cases one wants a second level (dropdown) menu below each first level menu
and this is not at all clear how it should be done. Can anyone give some
help on how to do this with CSS?



"Jim" <updateme> wrote in message
news:2340
[..]

"Neal Stoughton" wrote:
[..]

If the moderator would be so kind as to delete my previous void post!

Yes I can do that: where to find multi-level css-menus

The reseach site with all the all the ground work done for css menus is to
be found at http://www.alistapart.com and you will want to read the articles
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dropdowns/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/horizdropdowns/ or just search the site
for the keyword menu.

Get an actually functional and working implementation of the previous
research
for a multi level css-based java-less horizontal or vertical menu system at
http://www.seoconsultants.com/css/menus/vertical/ This implementation makes
list-o-matic look like a toy albeit with a slick user interface.

This solution by Tanfa is very well documented and my own experience is
- very good cross browser compatibility (but not perfect)
- very decent performance
- ease of use
however formatting the the menu system is not trival but once you have it
set up
adding and removing menu-items and menu-levels is straight forward end very
elegant: it is just a matter of adding li-tagged elements. All the horror is
tucked away in a menu.css and a htc-file. The genious of the solution is to
combine css with htc for IEs < 7.
Th htc-file simulates hover functionality in IE for tags that are not anchors.

Some known issues or What doesn't work with this approach:
* Sometimes printing a webpage with the menus gives you gibberish
* There are rounding differences between browsers, shifting menu items a few
pixels out of position you can solve that by leaving some free space between
the menu items
* If other sylesheets you use contain errors or apply invalid contructs some
webpages may lock up when being rendered.
* If you copy the webpage with menu into a e-mail message the menu doesn't
display as desired in the e-mail.
If you have the time, the know-how and interest these issues can be solved.

Microsoft has a hybrid css/java solution on display at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ecapturecm.asp
but MS says it is not fully cross-browser safe

I have used the pure css-menu for about een year now in several projects
and am quite satisfied despite the few known issues. But seeing the
work MS is putting into the new products javascript is the way to.
But not the stuff you write yourself, I'm seeing it in Visual Studio,
SharePoint: impressive js-libraries that are replacing AxtiveX functionality.
I cannot imagine that this is not going to be available in EWD at some time
also
for menus.

"Luke S" <LukeS> wrote in message
news:33be
> If the moderator would be so kind as to delete my previous void post!

this is a newsgroup it doesn't work that way...forums like the one your
using just pick up the newsgroup posts. Even if they deleted it there we can
still see it (those that use outlook express).


> I have used the pure css-menu for about een year now in several projects
> and am quite satisfied despite the few known issues. But seeing the
> work MS is putting into the new products javascript is the way to.
> But not the stuff you write yourself, I'm seeing it in Visual Studio,
> SharePoint: impressive js-libraries that are replacing AxtiveX
> functionality.
> I cannot imagine that this is not going to be available in EWD at some
> time
> also
> for menus.

ya forgot to mention one thing... accessbility ..... though jpoint does have
it built in from what i read in .net mag.

Don't replace your css menus with js menus and not have the same full menus
in text. You don't want to be a 'Target' do you?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15419164/

Oh what a pun!

Tina