floating php menu

dwahlrab

Hello,
I'm a very novice web designer. I have a site where I'm trying to have a php require menu load into the foreground above whatever page it might load below, or behind it. Please view this site:
http://www.djunawahlrab.com/06/home.php
here you can see that the menu is on the left side, but in some browsers (Firefox for example) the menu is falling Behind what should be in the background. if I click on or around where the menu is, I can get it to come forward, but that seems less than satisfactory, I'm sure you can imagine.
any ideas? maybe what I'm asking for would make things TOO easy, and its just impossible...
THANKS!
djuna
Reply

greenie2600

I'm having a different problem - it looks fine in Firefox, but in IE6 and IE7, the background Flash movie appears below the menu.

I'm not sure exactly why that's happening, but the markup on this page is full of no-nos:

You're using tables to control layout. Tables should only be used for tabular data. Use <div>s and CSS positioning instead.
You're using deprecated attributes, such as bgcolor, alink, and vlink. Use CSS instead.
You're using tags and attributes that aren't even part of the HTML spec, such as cool, content, xpos, cntrlrow, <spacer>, etc.

I'm guessing that you're using some kind of WYSIWYG HTML editor. I'd strongly advise learning to write HTML by hand - it's really the only way to do things right. HTML is intended to describe semantics, not visual presentation, so it's not appropriate to design HTML using a visual tool.

Welcome to the forums, by the way!

Weedpacket

On the subject of markup correctness, W3C's validator flags forty-two errors, including serious things like stray DOCTYPE declarations and extra <html> and <body> elements which, if they're not fixed, would mean that all bets are off regarding how the page will be rendered.

dwahlrab

weepacket, was that a comment for me? all bets are off? I'm sorry, I don't know enough to make much use of that.
and the first reply, is saying that I need to learn html. I agree its a good idea, but I just can't get to it at the moment, too many other languages to soak up. I'd love to find a particular error in my code that could be fixed. here is what I have:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>

<head>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
	<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive">
	<title>Djuna Wahlrab</title>
	<style type="text/css" media="screen"><!--#content    { position: absolute; z-index: -1; top: 0; left: 150px; width: 500px }

#menu { visibility: visible; position: fixed; z-index: 20; top: 25px; left: 25px; width: 43px }
--></style>
</head>

<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
	<div id="menu">
		<?php require ('menu.php'); ?></div>
	<table width="800" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" cool gridx="16" gridy="16" height="558" showgridx showgridy usegridx usegridy>
		<tr height="16">
			<td width="48" height="557" rowspan="2"></td>
			<td width="751" height="16"></td>
			<td width="1" height="16"><spacer type="block" width="1" height="16"></td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="541">
			<td width="751" height="541" valign="top" align="left" xpos="48"><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" height="532" width="740">
					<param name="movie" value="bkg.swf">
					<param name="quality" value="best">
					<param name="play" value="true">
					<embed height="532" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="bkg.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="740" quality="best" play="true">
				</object></td>
			<td width="1" height="541"><spacer type="block" width="1" height="541"></td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="1" cntrlrow>
			<td width="48" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="48" height="1"></td>
			<td width="751" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="751" height="1"></td>
			<td width="1" height="1"></td>
		</tr>
	</table>
	<p></p>
</body>

</html>[/COLOR]

bradgrafelman

The problems that Weedpacket was referring to are caused by extra <html> and <body> tags in the included menu.php file. Since you're including this .php file INSIDE of another page, you can't output a complete HTML page from menu.php - it's like you're trying to put a page inside of a page.