woooooohoooo. got the javascript to run!!!!

[mopinko]

man, this web design shit is just brain crushing. but i got lightbox to run, so i can proceed. so glad. for a while there it looked like i might show up at the last class with nothing to show. phew.

[mopinko]

1. shit

missing the groovy navigation.

[HopeHoops]

2. I use CSS for navigation and mouseover stuff. It is more reliable.

Just a thought.

[mopinko]

3. could you post me a snippet? no really

this is a beautiful program, imho. it gives a lovely presentation of the images, which is what the site is all about.

i did get the navigation to work, sorta. but the next button has gone walkabout, and it seems to be getting hung up, because it thinks there are more images in the array than there are.
argh. i think my chances of finding the bug in a couple thousand lines of code that i have no clue about, really, are, well.....
maybe dh will be able to help. he is not a web guy, but he does deal with bugs, and bazillions of lines of code, and stuff.

now if i can get the image pan sorted out...

[HopeHoops]

4. Have you used CSS before?

It isn't like Javascript. There are a shitload of good tutorials on the web. A "snippet" won't do much good unless you are using CSS on the page already. Basically, if you have a class of page objects (like navigation buttons), you can use CSS to set the border style and what styles apply when you mouse over (unclicked), click, it has already been visited, etc. The O'Reilly book on the subject is the definitive reference.

The mouse things will work in all current browsers, but IE has some fuck-ups with borders. Actually, IE (including 7) has a shitload of fuck-ups - but that's M$ for you.

[mopinko]

6. i'm taking a beginning class, although i have been trying to learn it for

a while. took some apple classes, and banged my head on it quite a bit. so, i am starting to absorb it, but i still have to think hard about a lot of stuff.
so, javascript is something that i cut and paste, and code is something that i hope dreamweaver writes correctly.
so, my css is pretty basic, as is everything else that i have written. i get what it is supposed to be, but i am a long way from making it happen like i want.

here is the javascript that i am "using"
http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/

[HopeHoops]

8. This is a good place to start....

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp - a basic on-line (free) tutorial. It will get you started pretty quickly.

Now, that said, you should still get a good reference book. And by that, I mean the CSS Reference published by O'Reilly. It points out a lot of the failings of IE (up through 6) and you can find work-arounds with simple Internet searches. IE 6 is more compliant than previous versions, but it still has some boogers. A lot of the boogers are still present in IE 7.

My dad uses Dreamweaver and gets pretty good results from it. Be careful with mucking with any CSS that it produces or you might not be able to get Dreamweaver to read it correctly. I hand code everything in Notepad. Old habit going back to HTML 1.0.

The real point of using CSS is to take the presentation details out of the HTML and let the HTML just be content. That was the original intent, but HTML quickly became polluted with markup tags like "<font>". With CSS, rather than using a "<font>" tag, you give an element a class (if it is a common attribute) or id (if it is specific to one instance) and then specify the formatting in the CSS file. This allows you to change the appearance of every page that uses the common CSS file by just editing that one file. If the markup is all embedded in the HTML files, you would have to change every single one to do something simple like switch all H2 headers from blue to red.

Anyway, give the tutorial a read and take a look at the CSS file Dreamweaver produces to get a feel for how it is doing things. Enjoy!

[Yavin4]

5. I'm A Little Rusty on my JavaScript

When you say, "...because it thinks there are more images in the array than there are". That's because you need to code some type of check to see if it is the last image in the array or not. An Array has a fixed number of elements in it, so there should be some sort of check to see if you're at the end or not.

Again, my JavaScript is rusty. I'm more of a regular programmer/database person than web developer, though I need to work on those skills as well.

[mopinko]

7. actually, array is the wrong word.

i have a parent div with thumbnails, 3 child divs with 4 thumbnails each. after the first image, it puts the next button in the wrong place, fails to unveil like it is supposed to, and it thinks that there are 19 images instead of 12. it sticks on the 4th thumbnail, displaying it several times.
so, i know there is an image loading script in there that is not resetting correctly, but i am completely puzzled as to why it has chosen to see those images several times.