any suggestions?

[Anon]

hello everyone. I am designing a page for a university website and they have a menu down the left hand side of the page. The problem is how to display the contents of each link - i could use frames but i'm a bit reluctant to. Short of reloading the entire page when a link is clicked, (which will take time, the menu code is quite long), is there a way of getting the page to load a specific "sub page" when a link is clicked on, while leaving the rest of the page intact? Is this in fact a javascript problem or can it be done with php?

I hope this makes sense, many thanks,

jonny hopper

[Anon]

Well, when you comes right down to it, you're want frames without using frames.

I'd go ahead and reload the whole page, it's not going to hurt that much: if there are images they'll be cached, and it'll make it much easier to tweak the menu on a subarea-by-subarea basis (and that might be a good idea, if the menu really is that long).

PHP will help in that the menu HTML can go in a seperate file and included as necessary (okay, servers can do this, but PHP can be more flexible about it, such as the tweaking I mentioned).

If you went the Javascript route, you'd find that you'd have to load every single page into the browser in one almighty wallop, so that the Javascript could display it when its link is followed.

[Anon]

Javascript has an innnerHTML attribute for DIV tags. With the proper coding (such as OnClick commands for links), the HTML within a DIV can be changed without reloading the page.