Re: Navigation

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 08:12:01PM -0500, Matt Colyer wrote:
> I was thinking lately after using frontpage (yes I hate Microsoft but my
> work requires it), to use a navigation scheme based on html comments
> such as :
> <!-- navGen linksShown=child,parent -->
> <a href=".....
> <a href=".....
> <!-- /navGen -->
> Then have a program read an xml tree of the site and replace all the
> navigation between the two tags only if the links have changed. I am not
> sure if such a program exists but I was thinking about writing it this
> summer for Screem (http://screem.sourceforge.net)

This seems like a somewhat backward way of doing it. What I've done before,
that seems to work pretty well, is to have a directory hierarchy that closely
mimics the navigation hierarchy. Then, have the template include a navigation
include from the same dir as the current file.

The template contains something like:

navitem("Text", "link");
navitem("Text", "link");
navitem("Text", "link");

And so on. navitem is a function that compares the link with the path to the
current page, and does the appropriate thing if they're the same.

There's a little more to it, like highlighting several levels of hierarchy,
but this is the basic idea. It's fairly easy to do, and works very well.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/