unordered lists

[gabrielcrowe]

i'm having a real issue with actinics lack of text navigation tools.

the javascript menu's solution is fine, and looks the part, as discussed many times on this community, but sadly its not got what it takes for the search engine ranking stakes.

i tried writing an app in vb that parses the array file generated by actinic, and including it in my pages with SSI but it fell apart when i changed layouts and its just too damned complicated.

at the moment, i hand code my navigation, byt the shop has just gotten far too big to do that.

there is something that i feel can save me, (before actinic includes simple nav building options) and thats the sitemap.

the sitemap contains everything i need and in fact, the same way as i'm building it right now, but on the wrong page.

with some clever css and dhtml, i made the sitemap code a popout list, and is uber search engine friendly++

my problem is this: how can i get only the list elements from the sitemap on their own, and in a customvar? is this even possible? i'd happily lose the sitemap page, if i could create a page that has no trimmings, so that i could use it as an include.

and also, a question for the developers, will editable text based nav's ever make their way into this great product?

-thanks for your time in advance.

[gabrielcrowe]

please excuse my carriage returns. working with lists all day does that to a man

[NormanRouxel]

I doubt that what you want is possible re the Customvar.

However a much neater solution would be to use PHP to process the Act_section_tree.js or the sitemap.html and output it as the HTML you require.

I've parsed Act_section_tree.js via PHP in order to write an alternative JavaScript file that's compressed and stripped down to use only the required elements and it wan't too tricky. The idea here was to reduce the file to about 1/4 it's size without losing functionality. I've been nagging Actinic for years that this structure is too long winded and contains many repeated strings.

Most people with JavaScript navigation, include a simple text link to sitemap.html on the front (or every) page to alolow spiders full access to the entire site.

[gabrielcrowe]

thanks for the quick reply

i'm trying to use as little javascript as possible. and the thought of using it as navigation frightens me. i'm taking parts of various discussions here on the board and help from everyone here to create a scalable css template set. I'm nearly done, and actinic has played fair all way, letting me change anything i wanted to to twist it to my xhtml whims. but this one is killing me.

when i'm done, i'll make a theme, and share it, just as others have. My theme at the moment, supports (shakily) things that perhaps actinic hadnt thought of. Pocket PCs, mobile phones, PSP handhelds, webtv and Xbox console browsers.

your code to manipulate the .js can i buy it, or could you perhaps let me investigate? it sounds like just what i need to finish this puzzle.

[NormanRouxel]

If you e-mail me I'll send you the code to examine. Although it doesn't do what you want it may help.

the thought of using it as navigation frightens me

I did a quick check and there are 89,000 pages using my NorTree JavaScript dynamic menu and 56,000 using the NorCascade one!

[gabrielcrowe]

its not that i dont find it usefull, or otherwise important. its just that the devices in my scope, some of them dont support full javascript, like xml phones, for instance. and the .js include gets big. and really, the PSP has limited memory and cant hold very much data on a page. the Xbox 360 has rudimentary browsing, and this also supports a limited subset of any scripting languages.

i'll email you now norman, thanks for the help.

[NormanRouxel]

It'll be interesting to see what you're selling if you expect many game system users to be shopping from their consoles.

Anything but a full PC and you do seem to get a severly restricted experience. I've got a Windows Mobile 5 phone and am amazed that the IE on it doesn't even support JavaScript. Luckily I can install the (smaller) Opera and get a reasonably featured browser.

[NormanRouxel]

I've just remembered that I did an experimental Actinic interface to an CSS based menu that uses normal HTML Lists as the core data. The idea being that non-JS browsers (and spiders) see the HTML List and if you have a reasonable browser a dynamic menu is shown instead.

See www.twinhelix.com/dhtml/fsmenu/ for the core code.

[pinbrook]

I'd be interested to see an automated solution to reformat thesitemap, at present i manually alter the sitemap so I can produce a set of links to place at the bottom of each page to counteract my JS navigation menu.

i then place my new code in a txt file which is called as a customvar. Of course I forget to change the txt file everytime I change the nav/actinic tree

[jont]

Looking at the twinhelix CSS code the submenu <ul> tags are set initially to display:hidden ... could this not cause further issues with Google et al picking up on the hidden text as spam?

[gabrielcrowe]

hehe, this menu is almost exactly like the one i'd allready coded.

damn, thats hours of fiddling with css wasted.

the way i'v devised is thus:

1 - let the site build, sitemap et al.
2 - using the sitemap templates, put some placeholders around the code
3 - grep out the outer content using cron. daily.
4 - have grep save the lists to a file in my webroot 'nav.htm'
5 - enable the server to use includes regardless of the shtml extension
6 - include the file in my css'd act primary. <!--#include file="nav.htm"-->
7 - cry as you realise your product base makes the page 500kb (j/k)

and, on an experimental server, it works fine, but in production, the page becomes too big. cats in cats in cats make a biiiig mess.

[gabrielcrowe]

with the popularity of wireless internet, and the flourish of embedded technologies, its fair to assume that a percentage of the market will be geared towards other devices.

the idea was to make it possible to reshuffle the content on a whim, to allow any new devices, and browsers, the chance to use the site to their fullest, without compromising and going to their pc to do it.

i know that right now, its a rather fruitless effort, since every timmy on the planet will be engrossed on IE7 and all that jazz, but i'm hoping on being the first actinic business ever to have popularity via embedded portable devices.

isnt that worth a spot on actinics showcase?

[jont]

I asked the question about 6 months (or more) ago if anyone had managed to design for a hand-held device and did not receive 1 reply

[gabrielcrowe]

well, its looking like the trickery required to get it working is far from over for me. i'v found a whole host of new and interesting things to break it. lol.

[gabrielcrowe]

incidentally, i found this this morning.

and i had no idea myself.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/19/mobile_ipsos/