Ken Jenks

There's a problem faced by all Web designers: making a menu look interesting without taking forever to load. Many modern applications address this problem using active menus that indicate where the mouse is by changing the color of the menu items as the mouse cursor passes over them. (Pull down any standard menu on a Windows machine to see this in action.) On Web pages this is often done by a JavaScript application that swaps images, but this technique is slow, and it doesn't work in all browsers. In this article I'll show how to build this kind of active menu with text, not graphics. This "change style on hover" feature is built into Dynamic HTML in Microsoft Internet Explorer, but in Netscape Communicator 4 this trick requires cascading style sheets, layers and JavaScript. This technique saves download time by using text menus instead of images. There's only one ... (more)

Putting JavaScript Bookmarks to Work

Hypertext is wonderful. It allows the Webmaster to link from any page to millions of other computers all over the world. Unfortunately, the Web pages you find will only have the links that were placed by the Webmasters. What if you want more information about a word or a phrase on a page and there's no link? This brief article shows how to add JavaScript code to your bookmarks - or favorites - thereby allowing you to do some fancy linking where no links exist. For example, if a Web page contains the word ennui and you want a definition for it, you could hunt through your bookmar... (more)