Floating DHTML menu problem with zoom hit-higlighted pages

[Anonymous]

Hi,
I have a floating dhtml menu which is positioned in a cell of a centered table on an html page. I used zoom's php search with highlight within document option selected. Now, when the page with dhtml menu is found in the search results, and I click on it, my floating dhtml menu just stays in the top left corner. However, the hits on the page are highlighted correctly. It's just the menu positioning that gets screwed up.

I tried putting to excude the dhtml menu code from being indexed, but it didn't help. If anyone here knows what's happening, please let me know. Thanks for reading. - Anastasia

[David]

Can you post the URL to the search fuction and the page that isn't working.

Thanks
David

[Anonymous]

Sure. Here it is.

http://www.quinlan.com/cd-rom/grant_eval.html

The floating menu on this page works fine. Now, if you search for, say, "grant" and click on the second search result (2. Evaluating the Grant), the menu jumps to the top left corner. Please help.

[Anonymous]

And here you can download search.php and settings.php files.

http://www.quinlan.com/cd-rom/search_func.zip

[Ray]

Your floating DHTML menu relies on Javascript to move the box from the top left to the far right. It is possible that this can conflict with the highlighting Javascript if the DHTML menu is dependent on being loaded first and this is not well specified.

However, when we looked at the page in question (following your instructions), everything appeared to worked fine.

The page in question being this (without highlighting):
http://www.quinlan.com/cd-rom/grant_eval.html

And this (highlighting the word 'grant'):
http://www.quinlan.com/cd-rom/grant_...ighlight=grant

On the latter URL, it would move the box from far left to right, and then highlight and scroll down to the first word - as expected.

Also of note are the browsers being used to view the page. Javascript is completely dependent on the client-side browser. We tested the above to work with both Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.0.4.

[Anonymous]

Dear Ray,

thanks for investigating my issue. The way you describe it, it does seem to have worked correctly for you. It is supposed to move from top left corner into the provided space on the right.

I tested the page with different browsers and it works best in Opera. It also works satisfactory in Netscape 7.2, but not in Netscape 8; in Firefox, Mozilla 1.7.3. But it does not work in IE 6 on PC, WindowsXP with SP2. It stays in the top left corner.

Anyways, I appreciate all your help and will try and figure out how to make the DHTML script run before the highlighting script. If you come up with anything in the meantime, please let me know. You can send me a message to webmasterATquinlan.com

Thank you very much.

[Nenad]

I tested the page with different browsers and it works best in Opera. It also works satisfactory in Netscape 7.2, but not in Netscape 8; in Firefox, Mozilla 1.7.3. But it does not work in IE 6 on PC, WindowsXP with SP2. It stays in the top left corner.

Interesting post ... because I'm using the same DHTML software to create nice menus and so far have no problem with it.
I have PC with WinXP SP2 and IE6 and your pages work normal. The menu moves from far left to the right possition, and after a while, highlighted words appear. I saw in source you call higlight function at the very end of file but before you check type of browser and OS. Also I tested them in Netscape 8.0.3 in both ways (I mean Mozilla and IE) and everything is fine.
So, I can't see the problems you mentioned in you post.

[Anonymous]

I added the browser check last night and if the browser is IE6, then I put a delay on the highlight function. This gives the dhtml menu enough time to float from top left corner to the correct spot on the right (unless someone has a really slow computer). Only then the highlight function takes over. It "freezes" the menu in place and puts highlights on it.

But as you can see, when it is viewed through Netscape 7.2, Firefox, or Opera, the highlighting works a little different. The keywords in the menu are highlighted and when I scroll the menu floats with the page. Just like it does without highlights. In other words, highlightind does not "freeze" the menu in it's position, like it does with IE6. I believe it has to do with

var x = document.body;

in the highlight.js and maybe with my doctype declaration, wich is

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http&#58;//www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I'll try and figure this out. Otherwise, I'll leave it with the "delay workaround." Thanks to all of you who looked into this issue. I'll post the solution if I find it.

[Ray]

I should add that I had tested it to work fine on IE 6.0 and Firefox 1.0.4, both on Windows XP SP2.

And yes, it appears that on Firefox, the menu behaviour is very different. It does not scroll from left to right, but it simply appears on the top right corner, and then move up and down as you scroll the window. I can't be sure if this is not the designed behaviour of the menu script though, as it may well be.

You might want to try calling the "highlight();" function from your menu script instead of from an onLoad= property, eg. after your script has finished moving everything around etc.