Originally published in Netscape World, now archived at the Wayback Machine
Microsoft and Netscape decided to use two different techniques for Dynamic HTML. Microsoft bases its approach on exposing CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets) attributes to script, with a little help from some interesting new built-in, lightweight, and windowless ActiveX controls. Netscape bases much of its approach on the new LAYER tag.
At first glance, the approaches seem incompatible — using one browser’s techniques will not work with the other. However, you can use both browsers’ techniques within the same page and generate the exact same result.
In this article, I create an animated menu bar using a combination of CSS1 style sheets, the PATH ActiveX control, and dynamically modifying HTML elements to work with IE 4.0. I create the exact same effect using CSS1 style sheets and the LAYER tag for Navigator 4.0. Note, though, that both IE 4.0 and Navigator 4.0 are works in progress, and this example may need to be modified, slightly, for future versions of either product.
Creating style sheetsThe first section of the example page is the CSS1 style sheet settings. Both IE 4.0 and Navigator 4.0 process these style sheets, though Navigator does not seem to like setting images using the IMG tag at this time.
This example image uses headers for the text-based portion of a menu bar. To create the effect I want, I don’t want the standard underline that occurs with hypertext links, and I do want to modify the font size and color. As I don’t want either of these changes to impact on the rest of the document, I use the cascading effect of CSS1 to apply these changes only to links contained within <H2> header tags:
h2 A { text-decoration: none; color: gold }
h2 A:link { color: gold }
h2 A:visited { color: gold }
Next, I create the style sheet definitions for the menu images, for use with IE 4.0 only. I use absolute positioning to place the images exactly where I want on the page, and use the visibility property to hide the images when the page is first opened:
#menu1 { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0;
visibility: hidden}
#menu2 { position: absolute; left: 142; top: 0;
visibility: hidden}
#menu3 { position: absolute; left: 284; top: 0;
visibility: hidden}
#menu4 { position: absolute; left: 192; top: 0;
visibility: hidden}
#menu5 { position: absolute; left: 142; top: 192;
visibility: hidden }
#menu6 { position: absolute; left: 284; top: 192;
visibility: hidden}
The final part of the CSS1 style sheet definition creates the text-based menu components of the menu bar. These show as soon as the page is opened, and if the Web page reader does not want to wait for the images, or has image downloading turned off, they can access the links via the text menu. The size of the area for the menu text item should be large enough to contain the complete text, otherwise odd behavior will result with Internet Explorer: It does not display the text correctly when you click on a text-based menu item. Another text-based style sheet rule is provided for a message that is displayed while the images are loading. Whenever you create content that may be invisible or not displayed for a time, provide some kind of feedback to the user about what is happening:
This is the final section of the CSS style sheet definitions.
Adding images to a Web pageThe next section in the example page is the scripting, but I will talk about that a bit later. For now, I will add the images to the Web page using two different techniques, one for IE 4.0, and one for Navigator 4.0. IE 4.0 uses the style sheet settings defined for the images, and references the appropriate definition by using the identifier of the style sheet rule. The Navigator technique is to embed the images within layers that are hidden when the page first loads. IE 4.0 ignores the LAYER tag, and Navigator ignores the image style sheet rules:
Note that a hypertext link reference is applied to the image, and the border is set to 0. As the image style sheet rules seem to be ignored by Navigator, important image information such as width, height, and border are specified within the image tag.
Next, the text objects are added to the menu bar. This includes a text-based alternative that labels each image when it is displayed, or can be accessed directly if the image is not displayed. This also includes a message stating that the images for the menu bar are being loaded:
The “waiting…” text is placed within a LAYER tag as I need to add script to modify it later, and only layer-based elements can be modified with Navigator at this time.
The final objects to add to the page are six ActiveX PATH objects, to control the menu bar animations for IE 4.0. A path object can be used to specify both X and Y coordinates at specific tick marks and moves the visual object associated with the control along that path. Two of the parameters for the control are the X path coordinates and the Y path coordinates. Another parameter could also control the timer, but I want to synchronize my image movement, so I use a different script-based approach later:
Notice that the X, Y coordinates for each path object are different, but all of them have the same number of timing ticks, which is the first parameter given in each of the coordinate pairings. The tick timings given are in microseconds.
The PATH ActiveX controls are the last elements placed into the page. Next comes the fun part, animating the menu bar.
Adding the script to animate the menu barThe animation is started when the page loads by trapping the onLoad event for the document. This calls a function called cycle. This function is implemented in both VBScript and JavaScript, and the appropriate browser picks the appropriate implementation, with Microsoft grabbing the VBscript version, Navigator grabbing the JavaScript version.
The first script controls the menu bar for IE 4.0. This is written entirely in VBScript, though JavaScript could be used if browser differences are handled correctly. The cycle function sets the Target properties of the path objects to the style sheet rules of the menu bar images. This associates each path control with its visual object. Next, the images are set to be visible, and the “waiting..” text is hidden.
The Play method for each path control is called, beginning the animation process, though no movement occurs yet. Why? No movement occurs because no timing mechanism has been associated with each control. The timing is handled by using the setTimeout function and calling a second subroutine that handles the image animation. The complete text of the cycle subroutine is here:
I use my own timer to synchronize the images, a technique that Microsoft recommends when using more than one PATH control on the same Web page.
The MoveIEObjects subroutine calls the Tick method for each of the path controls, moving each of the objects to the next coordinate defined for the specific control. It issues another setTimeout function call to continue the animation process, after first testing to see if the last movement of the path has occurred (the last of the ticks, of which there are eight for this particular demonstration). Note that I did not necessarily have to test the tick movement because after the path has completely played, it no longer moves unless it is rewound. However, I want to make sure the timer is not still operating. The complete text of MoveIEObjects is given next:
Next, I add the JavaScript to control the animation for Navigator 4.0. The cycle function for Navigator is similar to that for IE 4.0, except that I need to create my own arrays of X and Y coordinates. These arrays, in turn, are set to hold other arrays holding the actual coordinates. After the arrays are created, the images are displayed and the timer is started, as seen next:
The final script is for the MoveObjects function for Navigator. The LAYER tag method moveTo is used to move each of the images to the new coordinate for this timer event. Note that the timer values are set to be much larger than the ones set for IE 4.0 as the PATH control does run a bit slower than using the LAYER tag approach, and I wanted both effects to be as similar as possible. MoveObjects can be seen next:
Note that resizing Navigator can misalign the images. Netscape recommends a blank document.write statement in JavaScript to compensate for this type of problem, but this does not work for this example. I will continue to investigate this and will post a fix to my Web site when one appears. In the meantime, if you resize the Web page you need to reload the example. No problem occurs when you resize IE.
That’s it for the scripting. You can test the example yourself if you are using either IE 4.0 or Netscape 4 (this script will not work on earlier browsers). View the complete source by using the appropriate “View Source” option of your browser.